A Quantitative Theory of the Credit Score / Satyajit Chatterjee, Dean Corbae, Kyle P. Dempsey, José-Víctor Ríos-Rull.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chatterjee, Satyajit.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Corbae, Dean.

Dempsey, Kyle P.

Ríos-Rull, José-Víctor.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w27671.

NBER working paper series no. w27671

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

What is the role of credit scores in credit markets? We argue that it is a stand in for a market assessment of a person's unobservable type (which here we take to be patience). We pose a model of persistent hidden types where observable actions shape the public assessment of a person's type via Bayesian updating. We show how dynamic reputation can incentivize repayment without monetary costs of default beyond the administrative cost of filing for bankruptcy. Importantly we show how an economy with credit scores implements the same equilibrium allocation. We estimate the model using both credit market data and the evolution of individual's credit scores. We find a 3% difference in patience in almost equally sized groups in the population with significant turnover and a shift towards becoming more patient with age. If tracking of individual credit actions is outlawed, the benefits of bankruptcy forgiveness are outweighed by the higher interest rates associated with lower incentives to repay.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2020.