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

2002年，大约有900万美国家庭在发薪日贷款，通常支付的年利率超过7000%。这些贷款的期限等于一个支付周期的持续时间，在借款人的发薪日到期，并以远期个人支票作为抵押。从1999年到2003年，发薪日贷款借款总额增加了四倍，达到400亿美元。凭借近200万发薪日贷款申请，170万贷款和215，000名借款人的独特新数据集，该奖项资助的工作的主要目标是解释为什么消费者使用这些极其昂贵的金融工具。 两个候选假设脱颖而出。首先，消费者可能会经历消费需求的冲击，如医疗保健或汽车维修费用。这些冲击可能会提高消费的边际效用，足以解释以极高利率借款的原因。令人惊讶的是，现有的经济学研究很少研究消费冲击，拟议项目的一个重要的次要目标是探索消费冲击的模型，并量化它们在经济决策中的作用。发薪日借贷的第二个可能解释是，消费者可能会从未来的消费中大幅折扣效用。 将通过一项调查收集发薪日借款人实际消费支出的数据，以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，并解释为什么人们在发薪日贷款上以非常高的利率借款，来推进知识。发薪日贷款数据集的丰富性提供了一个不寻常的机会来进行这种调查，最近的工作（Gourinchas和帕克2002年，以及Laibson，Repetto和Tobacman 2004年）开发的技术将在这里应用和扩展。此外，该项目的成果可能会产生重要的广泛影响，特别是对社会中的弱势群体。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。提高对贫困家庭面临的冲击类型以及他们如何利用现有金融工具应对这种波动的理解，可以帮助决策者设计有效的干预措施。

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.