Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/217115 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Citation: 
[Journal:] Quantitative Economics [ISSN:] 1759-7331 [Volume:] 9 [Issue:] 2 [Publisher:] The Econometric Society [Place:] New Haven, CT [Year:] 2018 [Pages:] 785-823
Publisher: 
The Econometric Society, New Haven, CT
Abstract: 
This paper addresses the credit card debt puzzle using a generalization of the buffer-stock consumption model with long-term revolving debt contracts. Closely resembling actual US credit card law, we assume that card issuers can always deny their cardholders access to new debt, but that they cannot demand immediate repayment of the outstanding balance. Hereby, current debt can potentially soften a household's borrowing constraint in future periods, and thus provides extra liquidity. We show that for some intermediate values of liquid net worth it is indeed optimal for households to simultaneously hold positive gross debt and positive gross assets even though the interest rate on the debt is much higher than the return rate on the assets. Including a risk of being excluded from new borrowing which is positively correlated with unemployment, we are able to simultaneously explain a substantial share of the observed borrower-saver group and match a broad range of percentiles from the empirical distributions of credit card debt and liquid assets.
Subjects: 
Credit card debt puzzle
precautionary saving
consumption
JEL: 
D14
D91
E21
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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