[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedpwp/02-21.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The development and regulation of consumer credit reporting in America

Author

Listed:
  • Robert M. Hunt
Abstract
In the United States today, there is at least one credit bureau file, and probably three, for every credit-using individual in the country. Over 2 billion items of information are added to these files every month, and over 2 million credit reports are issued every day. Real-time access to credit bureau information has reduced the time required to approve a loan from a few weeks to just a few minutes. But credit bureaus have also been criticized for furnishing erroneous information and for compromising privacy. The result has been 30 years of regulation at the state and federal levels. ; This paper describes how the consumer credit reporting industry evolved from a few joint ventures of local retailers around 1900 to a high technology industry that plays a supporting role in America's trillion dollar consumer credit market. In many ways the development of the industry reflects the intuition developed in the theoretical literature on information-sharing arrangements. But the story is richer than the models. Credit bureaus have changed as retail and lending markets changed, and the impressive gains in productivity at credit bureaus are the result of their substantial investments in technology. ; Credit bureaus obviously benefit when their data are more reliable, but should we expect them to attain the socially efficient degree of accuracy? There are plausible reasons to think not, and this is the principal economic rationale for regulating the industry. An examination of the requirements of the Fair Credit Reporting Act reveals an attempt to attain an appropriate economic balancing of the benefits of a voluntary information sharing arrangement against the cost of any resulting mistakes.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert M. Hunt, 2002. "The development and regulation of consumer credit reporting in America," Working Papers 02-21, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedpwp:02-21
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-papers/2002/wp02-21.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Meta Brown & Andrew F. Haughwout & Donghoon Lee & Wilbert Van der Klaauw, 2013. "The financial crisis at the kitchen table: trends in household debt and credit," Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 19(April).
    2. Heski Bar-Isaac & Vicente Cuñat, 2014. "Long-Term Debt and Hidden Borrowing," The Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 3(1-2), pages 87-122.
    3. Federico Ferretti, 2007. "Consumer credit information systems: a critical review of the literature. Too little attention paid by Lawyers?," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 23(1), pages 71-88, February.
    4. Jonathan Spader, 2010. "Beyond Disparate Impact: Risk-based Pricing and Disparity in Consumer Credit History Scores," The Review of Black Political Economy, Springer;National Economic Association, vol. 37(2), pages 61-78, June.
    5. Avery, Robert B. & Calem, Paul S. & Canner, Glenn B., 2004. "Consumer credit scoring: Do situational circumstances matter?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 28(4), pages 835-856, April.
    6. Hunt Robert M., 2003. "An Introduction to the Economics of Payment Card Networks," Review of Network Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 2(2), pages 1-17, June.
    7. Heski Bar-Isaac & Vicente Cuñat, 2005. "Long term debt with Hidden Borrowing," Working Papers 05-04, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
    8. Robert B. Avery & Paul S. Calem & Glenn B. Canner, 2004. "Consumer credit scoring: do situational circumstances matter?," BIS Working Papers 146, Bank for International Settlements.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Consumer credit;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedpwp:02-21. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Beth Paul (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbphus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.