UNPREPARED FOR FINANCIAL SHOCKS: EMERGENCY SAVINGS AND CREDIT CARD DEBT

We measure readiness to face emergency expenses using data from a representative survey of U.S. consumers. Our main findings are as follows: (1) there is substantial heterogeneity in financial readiness, with lowest‐income, least‐educated, unemployed, and Black consumers most likely to have $0 saved for emergency expenses; (2) the amount of emergency savings is correlated with payment choice: Less financially prepared individuals use cash more and credit cards less, compared to those with higher emergency savings; (3) while people with low emergency savings rely more on cash than credit cards, they revolve more debt, and so a financial shock is costlier for them; (4) changes in income from one year to the next do not appear to affect the likelihood of revolving on credit cards or increase the amount borrowed, although the data were collected before the COVID‐19 pandemic. For those with little or no savings and already financially vulnerable, even a temporary financial shock—an unexpected negative income shock (such as a layoff or a short‐term government shutdown) or an unexpected expenditure (such as a medical expense or a car repair)—could have severe financial consequences, exacerbated by the high cost of borrowing on credit cards. (JEL D12, D14, D15, E21)     

NONPRICE COMPETITION IN THE TURKISH CREDIT CARD MARKET

Attempts to explain high and sticky credit card rates have given rise to a vast literature on credit card markets. This article endeavors to explain the rates in the Turkish market using measures of nonprice competition. In this market, issuers compete monopolistically by differentiating their credit card products. The fact that consumers perceive credit cards and all other banking services as a bundle allows banks to also employ bank level characteristics to differentiate their credit cards. Thus, the features and service quality of banks are expected to affect credit card rates. Panel data estimations also control for various costs associated with credit card lending. The results show that nonprice competition variables have significant and robust effects on credit card rates. (JEL G21, G28, O16)     

Monetary policy and credit cards: Evidence from a small open economy

This paper uses a unique monthly data set that covers the overall credit card usage in a small-open economy, Turkey, to investigate a possible credit channel of monetary policy transmission through credit cards. A reduced-form vector autoregression analysis is employed, where the forecast error variance decompositions are calculated for three-year windows over the period 2002–2009. It is shown that, during the recent financial crisis that has started in 2007, the monetary policy of Turkey has shifted toward focusing on output volatility and interest rate smoothing through setting short-term interest rates, while the inflation rate has been mostly affected by exchange rate movements and inflation inertia. Credit card usage has an increasing effect on inflation rates through time, requiring more policy emphasis on the credit channel through credit cards. When the effects of the credit view and the money view are compared, the former seems to be more effective on the real side of the economy, independent of the level of inflation.     

中韩信用卡相关法律关系与挂失风险承担之比较

中韩两国信用卡业务都始于二十世纪六、七十年代，但因中国信用卡业务比较单一，而且法律法规不完善，所以同韩国的信用卡业务相比较就非常落后。韩国信用卡业务的当事人只有发卡机构、持卡人和特约商户，而中国却还有担保人。在信用卡挂失后的风险承担问题方面，韩国采取的是发卡机构承担主义，而中国采取的却是持卡人承担主义。通过对中韩信用卡法律问题的比较分析，可为中国制定完善的信用卡法律法规提供可借鉴的经验。     

Credit cards and aggregate money demand

This paper attempts to assess the effect of the growth in the use of credit cards upon aggregate household money holdings. In an inventory theoretic structure, when individuals have the choice of whether to use a credit card as an alternative means of payments, and with a given income distribution, the aggregate money demand relation is derived. It is shown that the existence of an alternative means of payment changes the predictions on the relevant elasticities from the standard model, and makes them variable over time, and gives some indication of how credit card growth causes shifts in aggregate money demand.     

储蓄卡征收年费的法律问题初探

一直以来,各银行发放的储蓄卡以其免收年费、存取便利成为居民手中持有率大大高于信用卡的银行卡。但近几年来,多家银行纷纷作出对储蓄卡征收年费的方案,引起了社会各界的普遍关注。针对现实生活中存在的不同类型的储蓄卡,银行应采取不同的措施使这一行为合理、合法化。     

Credit limits and bankruptcy

Credit cards offer a limit, rather than a specific loan size, at a pre-approved interest rate. This paper studies the determination of these credit limits jointly with default in the presence of one-period debt. I adapt the standard incomplete markets macroeconomic model of one-period unsecured debt with the optimal choice of credit limit. Endogenous limits and positive default coexist. A numerical exercise illustrates the consequences of various factors for indebtedness, credit limits, and bankruptcy.     

DISCOUNTS FOR CASH IN RETAIL GASOLINE MARKETING

Before introducing cash discounting in retail gasoline markets, major oil companies offered proprietary credit cards as an unpriced service to their customers. This paper analyzes the origins of cash discounting in order to determine why oil companies introduced explicit pricing of the credit service in 1982 only to begin discouraging it by the end of the decade. Sharp increases in nominal interest rates and in the real price of gasoline between 1978–1982 spurred a rapid rise in the cost of financing accounts receivable. This increasing cost in part drove the initial decision to discount. By 1990 the discounting trend reversed as the costs of processing credit transactions and of the float associated with non-revolving accounts receivable fell.
Using station data from Delaware in 1983 and Washington in 1989, the paper also provides two separate estimations of the subsidy to credit buyers by cash buyers.     

信用卡发展与我国商业银行市场结构变迁研究——基于Panzar-Rosse模型的实证研究

首先采用Panzar-Rosse模型定量研究近几年来我国商业银行业市场结构的变迁,在此基础上进一步研究信用卡的发展与商业银行市场结构变迁的关系。对我国商业银行近十年数据的实证研究表明,由于近些年我国对于银行业的政策不断放开,市场竞争总体来说越来越激烈。但是,信用卡的发展却减弱了商业银行业市场的竞争强度。     

Explaining changes in the US credit card market: Lenders are using more information

We examine two changes in the cross-sectional distribution of credit card contracts over time: the increasing variance in interest rates and the increasing variance in credit limits, using data from the 1989–2013 Survey of Consumer Finances. Within this dataset, we show that financial institutions seem to be collecting and using more consumer information when extending credit. We then develop a life-cycle model of lending using a novel contract structure reflecting modern credit cards, where interest rates and credit limits are jointly determined before actual borrowing takes place. Within the model, giving lenders more information on consumers generates realistic results along several dimensions. More information leads to better pricing, moving the market from a ‘pooling’ to a ‘separating’ equilibrium, generating the observed increase in variances, with the gains primarily going to young agents.     

E-commerce transactions,the installed base of credit cards,and the potential mobile E-commerce adoption

Mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) relaxes consumers’ temporal and geographic purchasing constraints and encourage the establishment of omnichannel markets. It is often argued that rapid increase in smartphone penetration is the primary driver of m-commerce adoption, whereas others contend that early adoption of m-commerce applications are mostly by “relatively heavy” Internet commerce users. Brynjolfsson et al. (2013) argue that rapid increase in smartphone penetration is the primary driver of m-commerce adoption, whereas Einav et al. (2014) contend that early adoption of m-commerce applications are mostly by ‘relatively heavy’ Internet commerce users. This article explores strength of the influences within a nested multiple-service framework, where the reduced-form econometric analysis allows for interdependency between m-commerce and e-commerce services, and the installed base of credit cards. The results reveal a complex situation in which credit cards facilitate e-commerce services, whereas m-commerce adoptions are driven by prior e-commerce and online transaction activity. Also, higher respondent incomes are negatively associated with proposed m-commerce adoption. Surprisingly, privacy concerns do not affect proposed adoption independently; however, an interaction term suggests privacy remains an adoption barrier for the older persons.     

A Model of Money and Credit, with Application to the Credit Card Debt Puzzle

Many individuals simultaneously have significant credit card debt and money in the bank. The credit card debt puzzle is as follows: given high interest rates on credit cards and low rates on bank accounts, why not pay down debt? While some economists go to elaborate lengths to explain this, we argue it is a special case of the rate of return dominance puzzle from monetary economics. We extend standard monetary theory to incorporate consumer debt, which is interesting in its own right since developing models where money and credit coexist is a long-standing challenge. Our model is quite tractable—for example, it readily yields nice existence and characterization results—and helps put into context recent discussions of consumer debt.     

Credit card cash‐out as informal financing: Evidence from China

Using a proprietary account‐level database from a commercial bank in China, we document that credit card holders can ease their credit constraints through the practice of cash‐out based on bogus transactions using credit cards. We find that such behaviour might be beneficial to both cardholders and banks. First, we find that a 1% increase in the cumulative number of credit card cash‐out transactions lowers the probability of default by 9.59%. Second, for private businesses, a 1% increase in the number of abnormal cash‐out transactions lowers overdue risk by 13.45%. Third, by lowering the overdue risk, the card‐issuing bank earns a larger profit. Our results are consistent with the notion that unconventional credit card cash‐out can mitigate the extent of capital misallocation in emerging markets.     

Low-income consumers and payment choice

Low-income consumers are not only constrained with spending, but also with the type and variety of payment methods available to them. Using a representative sample of the U.S. adult population, this short article analyzes the low possession (adoption) of credit and debit cards among low-income consumers who are also unbanked. Using a random utility model, I simulate the potential consumer welfare gains associated with policy options suggested in the literature to provide unsubsidized or subsidized debit cards, or subsidized prepaid cards to this consumer population. Simulation results show the relative improvement in consumer welfare among all three policy options.     

商业银行信用卡业务发展与风险管理

回顾信用卡业务在我国的发展历程、分析信用卡业务的发展现状,不难发现中国已成为全球信用卡业务增长最快、发展潜力最大的市场。作为未来消费信贷的重要增长点,在金融行业民间资本准入制度的放开、全球化进程不断深入、移动互联快速普及的大数据时代,民间资本、外资银行对信用卡业务的广泛渗透,以及互联网金融的创新发展,必将导致国内信用卡业务参与方关系日趋复杂,信用卡市场竞争日趋激烈。因此,信用卡业务发展过程中所面临的问题及发行风险不容忽视。文中采用行为概率及效用函数的方法对信用卡消费行为进行博弈分析,应用行为分析的结果,对信用卡业务中诸如个人信用登记评估制度,发卡机构营销、审批机制和产品附加值,消费管理和奖惩制度及法律法规制定等相关问题进行了剖析,系统分析了银行信用卡发行过程中的风险,并对信用卡市场的健康发展提出了几点建议。     

The no-surcharge rule and surcharging behaviours in credit card markets

We investigate the welfare implications of banning the no-surcharge rule (NSR) in credit card markets. In particular, we introduce a governance mechanism alteration and merchants' heterogeneity into the model of Wright (2003). In doing so, we find two market forces exist in the transition of lifting the NSR. The first force is the classical double marginalisation because of merchants being able to deliberately impose a surcharge. The second force arises from a market structure change that merchants, who did not accept credit cards payments, do accept afterwards. Our model shows that the welfare implication hinges on the relative magnitudes of both market forces. More importantly, this article provides an explanation for the surcharging behaviours of merchants in Australia after the removal of the NSR in 2003, which have not been explained in the literature.     

我国银行卡市场发展状况与对策研究

银行卡是具有存款、取款、转账结算、消费等功能的信用支付工具。我国银行卡市场经过二十几年的发展,取得了重大成就。本文从我国银行卡市场的发展状况入手,分析了发展中存在的问题,在此基础上提出了加快我国银行卡市场快速健康发展的对策建议。     

Will that be cash or credit? Payment preferences and rising VAT in Argentina

This article studies how Argentina’s value-added tax (VAT) revenue has risen to historic highs since its 2001 sovereign default and continues to grow despite unchanged VAT rates, slow economic growth, stagnant household consumption, and low commodity prices after 2010. In 2015, VAT revenue accounted for one-quarter of all tax revenue in Argentina. We show that Argentina’s banked population went from less than 41.6% in 2003 to 89.6% in 2016. Consequently, there was significant growth in electronic payments via credit cards and debit cards. Using time series regression, the authors show that the rising banked population and card growth is correlated with VAT-to-GDP increases from 2002 to 2015. The authors posit that one reason for these correlations is that some consumption is shifting from informal (harder to tax) markets to formal (easier to tax markets) as cash use declined and card use grew. Also, rising electronic payments likely explains improved VAT compliance as well—the Argentine VAT noncompliance rate averaged 36.4% between 2000 and 2005 but improved to 20.5% between 2006 and 2010 (Trigueros, Longinotti, & Vecorena, 2013).     

信用卡支付如何影响主观幸福感?——基于萨缪尔森幸福公式的研究

信用卡是一项功能性金融基础设施,现有研究多数止步于信用卡的消费溢价效应,尚未关注其终极福祉效应.文章基于萨缪尔森幸福公式,分析了信用卡支付影响主观幸福感的作用机理,阐述了其并联机制和串联机制.在此基础上,文章运用条件混合过程模型评估了信用卡支付对主观幸福感的影响,采用因果中介效应分析方法识别了其作用机制.研究发现,信用卡支付显著侵蚀了持卡人的主观幸福感,幸福侵蚀效应是通过串联机制而非并联机制传导的.具体来说,信用卡支付经由欲望膨胀渠道和消费实现渠道所构成的串联机制,降低了持卡人的主观幸福感.另外,信用卡支付的幸福侵蚀效应会因使用动机、家中地位以及城乡和地区差异而表现出异质性.     

Plastic Money Diffusion and Usage: An Empirical Analysis on Italian Households

This paper tries to contribute to the empirical literature on the European consumers’ plastic money payment habits, using the Bank of Italy data over the 1993–2008 period. In line with other evidence on this topic, mainly focused on the US economy, we find that age, education, non‐durable consumptions, regional variation and income are strong predictors of plastic money possession and use in Italy. We also find that households with a higher indebtedness level have a higher propensity to hold credit cards. Furthermore, we find that technological improvements, observed in the last 15 years, do not significantly affect the marginal probabilities to hold and use plastic money conditioned to the main socio‐demographic factors.