Auto lenders were perhaps the biggest winners of the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform. Cars depreciate quickly, so borrowers often owe more than their car is worth. Prior to the Reform, these borrowers could reduce the principal on their auto loan to the market value of the car through a "cramdown" in...

Why do retail consumers look for P2P financial intermediation? Are internetbased peer-to-peer (P2P) loans a substitute for or a complement to bank loans? In this study we answer these questions by comparing P2P lending with the nonconstruction consumer credit market in Germany. We show that P2P...

In this study, we set up a DSGE model with upward looking consumption comparison and show that consumption externalities are an important driver of consumer credit dynamics. Our model economy is populated by two different household types. Investors, who hold the economy's capital stock, own the...

Household access to financial products is often conditioned on previous use. However, banning access when learning is possible may be discriminatory or counterproductive. The 'experiment' of German reunification (exogenously) offered to East Germans unconditional access to (exogenously)...

We examine how consumer credit access impacts self-employment and small business ownership by building a new dataset that links 3 million individual earnings and credit reports to pass-through tax records. We show that self-employment and employer business ownership increase with personal credit...

In this study, the relation between consumer credit and real economic activity during the Great Moderation is studied in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Our model economy is populated by two different household types. Investors, who hold the economy’s capital stock, own the...