Do Banks Pass Through Credit Expansions to Consumers Who Want To Borrow?
95 Pages Posted: 11 Jun 2015 Last revised: 15 Sep 2017
There are 4 versions of this paper
Do Banks Pass Through Credit Expansions to Consumers Who Want To Borrow?
Do Banks Pass Through Credit Expansions? The Marginal Profitability of Consumer Lending During the Great Recession
Do Banks Pass Through Credit Expansions to Consumers Who Want to Borrow?
Do Banks Pass Through Credit Expansions? The Marginal Profitability of Consumer Lending During the Great Recession
Date Written: May 12, 2017
Abstract
We propose a new approach to studying the pass-through of credit expansion policies that focuses on frictions, such as asymmetric information, that arise in the interaction between banks and borrowers. We decompose the effect of changes in banks' cost of funds on aggregate borrowing into the product of banks' marginal propensity to lend (MPL) to borrowers and those borrowers' marginal propensity to borrow (MPB), aggregated over all borrowers in the economy. We apply our framework by estimating heterogeneous MPBs and MPLs in the U.S. credit card market. Using panel data on 8.5 million credit cards and 743 credit limit regression discontinuities, we find that the MPB is declining in credit score, falling from 59% for consumers with FICO scores below 660 to essentially zero for consumers with FICO scores above 740. We use a simple model of optimal credit limits to show that a bank's MPL depends on a small number of parameters that can be estimated using our credit limit discontinuities. For the lowest FICO score consumers, higher credit limits sharply reduce profits from lending, limiting banks' optimal MPL to these consumers. The negative correlation between MPB and MPL reduces the impact of changes in banks' cost of funds on aggregate household borrowing, and highlights the importance of frictions in bank-borrower interactions for understanding the pass-through of credit expansions.
Keywords: Pass-Through, Monetary Policy, Credit Card Market, Asymmetric Information
JEL Classification: D14, E51, G21
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation