Doctoral Dissertation Research: Payday Loans, Consumption Shocks, and Discounting

博士论文研究：发薪日贷款、消费冲击和贴现

• 批准号: 0520045
• 负责人: David Laibson
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: National Bureau of Economic Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-09-01 至 2009-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0520045&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Payday; Loans

Roughly nine million American households borrowed on payday loans in 2002, typically paying annualized interest rates above seven thousand percent. These loans have a term equal to the duration of one pay cycle, mature on borrowers' paydays, and are collateralized with post-dated personal checks. The total volume of payday loan borrowing increased four-fold from 1999-2003 to a total of $40 billion. With a unique new dataset of nearly 2 million payday loan applications, 1.7 million loans, and 215,000 borrowers, the primary objective of the work funded by this award is to explain why consumers use these extremely expensive financial instruments. Two candidate hypotheses stand out. First, consumers may experience shocks to consumption needs like expenses for health care or car repairs. These shocks could raise the marginal utility of consumption enough to account for borrowing at very high interest rates. Surprisingly little existing economics research has studied consumption shocks, and an important secondary objective of the proposed project is to explore models of consumption shocks and quantify their role in economic decision-making. A second possible explanation for payday borrowing is that consumers might heavily discount utility from future consumption.The research will evaluate these hypotheses. A survey to collect data on payday borrowers' actual consumption expenditures will be used to gather data that directly indicate the magnitudes of consumption shocks. This research will advance knowledge by developing and testing new models of shocks to consumption needs and explaining why people borrow at very high interest rates on payday loans. The richness of the payday loan dataset provides an unusual opportunity to conduct this inquiry, and recent work (Gourinchas and Parker 2002, and Laibson, Repetto, and Tobacman 2004) developed techniques that will beapplied and extended here. In addition, the results of the project may have important broader impacts, particularly for disadvantaged groups in society. Since the median annual income of payday borrowers in the dataset is about $20,000, this research largely pertains to the circumstances and choices of low-income decision-makers. Improvedunderstanding both of the types of shocks poor households face and how they use available financial instruments to deal with that volatility can help policy-makers design effective interventions.

2002 年，大约有 900 万美国家庭通过发薪日贷款借款，通常支付的年利率高于 7000%。这些贷款的期限等于一个支付周期的期限，在借款人的发薪日到期，并以远期个人支票作为抵押。 1999-2003年间，发薪日贷款借款总额增加了四倍，达到400亿美元。该奖项资助的工作的主要目标是解释消费者为何使用这些极其昂贵的金融工具，该数据集包含近 200 万份发薪日贷款申请、170 万笔贷款和 215,000 名借款人。 有两个候选假设脱颖而出。首先，消费者可能会受到医疗保健或汽车维修费用等消费需求的冲击。这些冲击可能会提高消费的边际效用，足以解释以非常高的利率借贷的情况。令人惊讶的是，现有的经济学研究很少研究消费冲击，而拟议项目的一个重要的次要目标是探索消费冲击模型并量化其在经济决策中的作用。发薪日借贷的第二种可能的解释是，消费者可能会在未来消费中大幅打折效用。该研究将评估这些假设。 一项收集发薪日借款人实际消费支出数据的调查将用于收集直接表明消费冲击程度的数据。这项研究将通过开发和测试消费需求冲击的新模型并解释为什么人们以非常高的利率借发薪日贷款来增进知识。丰富的发薪日贷款数据集为进行这项调查提供了一个不寻常的机会，最近的工作（Gourinchas 和 Parker 2002，以及 Laibson、Repetto 和 Tobacman 2004）开发了将在此应用和扩展的技术。此外，该项目的结果可能会产生更广泛的重要影响，特别是对于社会中的弱势群体。由于数据集中发薪日借款人的年收入中位数约为 20,000 美元，因此这项研究主要涉及低收入决策者的情况和选择。更好地了解贫困家庭面临的两类冲击以及他们如何利用可用的金融工具应对这种波动，可以帮助政策制定者设计有效的干预措施。