Fed Conference on Consumer Credit

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has just announced the six research papers that will be the focus of its upcoming Recent Developments in Consumer Credit and Payments conference. The papers are all written by economists and touch on a variety of bankruptcy or consumer credit topics that may interest Credit Slips readers.  I’ve given the titles and brief descriptions of the papers below:

• The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions Over the Lifecycle (finding that middle-aged adults borrow at less cost compared to younger and older adults across ten financial market and that some of the measured effects cannot be explained by observed risk characteristics and may result from age effects)
• Who Makes Credit Card Mistakes? (reporting that lower wealth individuals make more credit card mistakes of all types)
• Bankruptcy: Is It Enough To Forgive or Must We Also Forget? (developing model suggesting that optimal law would forbid lenders from fully utilizing past information about bankruptcy)

• Information Technology and the Rise of Household Bankruptcy (using estimate model to measure relationship between increase in bankruptcy filings from 1992 and development of more informative credit ratings)

• Interest rates and Consumer Choice in the Residential Mortgage Market (exploring substitution effects between fixed rate and adjustable rate mortgages in the US and UK)

• Liquidity Constraints and Imperfection Information in Subprime Lending (using data from subprime auto sales company to examine how consumer liquidity constraints alter subprime borrowing conditions)

The conference will be held Sept. 20-21 in Philadelphia. Information on registration will be available here in the next few weeks.

UPDATE: The registration information is now available. There is no fee to attend but you  must register in advance.