Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Marina Halac • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jul, 2025, Volume 93, Issue 4

Private Information and Price Regulation in the US Credit Card Market

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18063
p. 1371-1410

Scott T. Nelson

The 2009 CARD Act limited credit card lenders' ability to raise borrowers' interest rates on the basis of new information. Pricing became less responsive to public and private signals of borrowers' risk and demand characteristics, and price dispersion fell by one‐third. I estimate the efficiency and distributional effects of this shift toward more pooled pricing. Prices fell for high‐risk and price‐inelastic consumers, but prices rose elsewhere in the market and newly exceeded willingness to pay for over 30% of the safest subprime borrowers. On net, average traded prices fell and consumer surplus rose at all credit scores. Higher consumer surplus was partly driven by a fall in lender profits, and partly by the Act's insurance value to borrowers who could retain favorable pricing after adverse changes to their default risk. The relatively high level of pre‐CARD‐Act markups was crucial for realizing these surplus gains.


Full Content

Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Private Information and Price Regulation in the US Credit Card Market"

Scott T. Nelson

This appendix first proves the consistency of my estimates of consumers’ private types. I then, in sections A.2 through A.4, present additional institutional details and background, details about the datasets I use, and descriptive results. Sections A.5 through A.8 provide additional details and results related to the model and its estimation. Finally, in Sections A.9 through A.10 I elaborate more on details of the counterfactuals and my counterfactual estimates.

Supplement to "Private Information and Price Regulation in the US Credit Card Market"

Scott T. Nelson

The replication package for this paper is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14025312. The authors were granted an exemption to publish their data because either access to the data is restricted or the authors do not have the right to republish them. However, the authors included in the package a simulated or synthetic dataset that allows running their codes. The Journal checked the synthetic/simulated data and the codes for their ability to generate all tables and figures in the paper and approved online appendices. However, the synthetic/simulated data are not designed to reproduce the same results.

Journal News

View