We use data from four releases of the Survey of Consumer Finances, 1983 to 1995, to examine credit card use among the poor. The credit card market has expanded rapidly in the general population and, given the often transitory nature of poverty, more and more families may be using credit cards rather than welfare or other means to smooth consumption across income shortfalls. Indeed, from 1983 to 1995, the percentage of poor families holding a credit card rose from less than 20 percent to almost 40 percent, and the average real balance on these cards rose from about $700 to more than $1,300. In 1983 the proportion of poor families with a credit card balance more than twice its monthly income was less than 1 in 30, but rose to 1 in 8 by 1995. The growth in debt represents a new and increasingly important development in the nature of poverty since the mid-1980s, and may soon create a need for administrative policy responses in the form of credit and debt management counseling for at-risk families. Among the research questions are raised are (1) Why has the credit card market expanded to include more economically vulnerable households? and (2) Is the new existence of easy credit temporarily softening the impact of welfare reform?
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Thomas Krichel).
Related research
Keywords:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? All full texts are decentralized with the publishers, none reside on this server, thus making it possible to offer this service for free to all parties.