Since the early 1990s, credit expanded relative to income, especially after 2001. It is hypothesized that traditionally uneven credit access and gaps in the costs of credit by demographic characteristics shrank during this period. Relying on data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance, this study looks at financial constraints, the costs of credit and a number of contributions to...

Does access to credit explain the gap in schooling attainment between children from richer and poorer families? I present new evidence on this important question using two college tuition loans in Chile. Both programs offer loans to students who score above a threshold on the national college admission test, enabling a regression discontinuity design. I find that loan access implies an increase...

Recent legislative efforts to protect credit unions against unfavorable legislation reflect the growing importance of credit unions in the U.S. financial services sector. Efforts to address new technologies, combined with deregulation in financial services, have led changes in the field of membership rules governing how credit unions are chartered and how they may grow. These regulations have c...

Credit reporting systems are an important ingredient for financial markets. These systems are based upon the unique identification of borrowers, which is enabled if a compulsory identification system exists in a country. We present evidence derived from difference-in-difference analyses on the impact of the interplay of credit reporting and identification systems on financial access and interme...

In this paper, we investigate whether and how personal bankruptcy law a ects small rms' access to credit. When a rm is unincorporated, its debts are personal liabilities of the rm's owner, so that lending to the rm is equivalent to lending to its owner. If the rm fails, the owner has an incentive to le for personal bankruptcy in order to obtain discharge of the rm's debts. While bankruptcy law ...