Economic Scarcity and Consumers’ Credit Choice
Riksbank Research Paper Series No. 153
Sveriges Riksbank Working Paper Series No. 329
52 Pages Posted: 7 Dec 2016 Last revised: 5 Jul 2018
There are 2 versions of this paper
Scarcity and Consumers’ Credit Choice
Economic Scarcity and Consumers’ Credit Choice
Date Written: October 1, 2016
Abstract
This paper documents that increased scarcity right before a payday causally impacts credit choices. Exploiting a transfer system that randomly assigns the number of days between paydays to Swedish social welfare recipients, we find that low educated borrowers behave as if they are more present-biased when making credit choices during days when their budget constraints are exogenously tighter. As a result their default risk and debt servicing cost increase significantly. Access to mainstream credit or liquidity buffers cannot explain our results. Our findings highlight that increased levels of economic scarcity risk to reinforce the conditions of poverty.
Keywords: household finance, present bias, scarcity, credit choice
JEL Classification: G02, G23, D14, D81
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation