Attitudes towards credit after the Great Recession

The US Survey of Consumer Finances provides a rich but underutilized source of data measuring attitudes towards credit. Using this data, this article finds there a great degree of heterogeneity in attitudes; however, the distribution of these attitudes has shifted only moderately after the financial crisis, with households on average only becoming a bit more conservative. There is evidence that age, race and gender affect attitudes towards credit, most noticeably when attitudes are broken down by specific credit use rather than credit in general.