Welcome to Paige Marta Skiba and Jeremy Tobacman

Credit Slips welcomes Paige Marta Skiba, a behavioral economist who studies payday lending. She earned her Ph.D in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 and is currently an assistant (corrected 6/24/08) professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School. She'll be joined in some or all her posts by her frequent co-author, Jeremy Tobacman, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Economics at Oxford University. Their current research uses a dataset from a payday lender with two million loan records to examine questions about the profitability of payday lenders, the relationship between payday borrowing and bankruptcy, and consumer behavior in payday-loan borrowing and default. With financial distress on the rise in America, payday lending looks like a growth industry. We look forward to reading more about their findings and thank them in advance for sharing their behavioral economics perspective on consumer borrowing.