222 posts on "Household Finance"
March 25, 2026
Sports Betting Is Everywhere, Especially on Credit Reports
Since 2018, more than thirty states have legalized mobile sports betting, leading to more than a half trillion dollars in wagers. In our recent Staff Report, we examine how legalized sports betting affects household financial health by comparing betting activity and consumer credit outcomes between states that legalized to those that have not. We find that legalization increases spending at online sportsbooks roughly tenfold, but betting does not stop at state boundaries. Nearby areas where betting is not legal still experience roughly 15 percent the increase of counties where it is legal. At the same time, consumer financial health suffers. Our analysis finds rising delinquencies in participating states, with spillover effects across state lines. What is more, even though the share of people taking up sports betting after legalization is small (roughly 3 percent of the population), overall credit delinquency rises by about 0.3 percentage points. Our findings suggest that sports betting can have dramatic implications for household financial stability.
February 10, 2026
Where Are Mortgage Delinquencies Rising the Most?
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data recently released its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the fourth quarter of 2025, revealing continued growth in household debt balances. Aggregate household debt balances rose by $191 billion to reach $18.8 trillion, marking a $4.6 trillion increase since the end of 2019. Mortgage balances grew by $98 billion to $13.2 trillion, while credit card debt increased by $44 billion to $1.28 trillion. Credit card and auto loan delinquency rates appear to have stabilized, albeit at elevated rates. By contrast, the delinquency rate for mortgages—although still near low levels on a longer-term basis—has been steadily increasing over the past few years. Underlying these aggregate figures, however, there are notable differences in mortgage credit performance across places with different income levels and labor and housing market dynamics. This analysis, as well as the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, are based on anonymous credit report data from Equifax.
February 3, 2026
A New Dataset for Consumer Spending in the New York Fed EHIs
We are enhancing our set of Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) by adding a set of metrics on consumer spending with data presented by income, education, race and ethnicity, age, and urban status. The data will help track the evolution of aggregate behavior by analyzing the spending of specific groups in a more timely manner than is possible using public surveys.
December 23, 2025
Tariffs, Trade, and Tumbling Credit Scores: The Top 5 LSE Posts of 2025
Each year brings a new set of economic challenges: In 2025, major areas of focus included tariffs and trade tensions, as well as the financial pressures facing younger adults. New York Fed economists contributed insightful research on both topics—and readers took notice. In fact, all five of the year’s most-read posts on Liberty Street Economics analyzed aspects of these issues. Read on to see how the restoration of student loan data to credit reports affected borrowers’ credit scores, whether the costs of a college degree are still worth it, how businesses are responding to higher tariffs, and why the U.S. runs a trade deficit.
October 14, 2025
Consumption Sensitivity of Uncertain Households
Uncertainty is a key component of everyday economic decisions of consumers and, perhaps not surprisingly, it plays a central role in economic models. According to economic theory, forward-looking consumers rely on their expectations and perceived uncertainty when making economic decisions. Nevertheless, measuring the uncertainty that households actually perceive, and how it affects consumer behavior, is challenging. The probabilistic nature of the Survey of Consumer Expectations enables us to make progress on this subject and to construct household-specific time-varying uncertainty. In our recent Staff Report, we empirically show that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is increasing and concave in perceived uncertainty. This novel empirical evidence poses a challenge for the conventional consumption-savings model with incomplete markets.
August 11, 2025
Who Is Still on First? An Update of Characteristics of First‑Time Homebuyers
Following the COVID-19 health crisis, home prices and mortgage rates rose sharply. This created concerns that first-time homebuyers (FTBs) would be disadvantaged and would lose ground. Earlier this year, we documented that the share of purchase mortgages by FTBs, as well as their share of home purchases, have actually increased slightly over the past couple of years. It appears that FTBs are holding their own in this challenging housing market. This raises the question of whether the characteristics of FTBs have changed. In a 2019 post, we described the characteristics of these buyers over the period from 2000 to 2016. In this post, we provide an update through 2024.
August 5, 2025
A Check‑In on the Mortgage Market
Debt balances continued to march upward in the second quarter of 2025, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. Mortgage balances in particular saw an increase of $131 billion. Following a steep rise in home prices since 2019, several housing markets have seen dips in prices and concerns were sparked about the state of the mortgage market. Here, we disaggregate mortgage balances and delinquency rates by type and region to better understand the landscape of the current mortgage market, where any ongoing risks may lie, regionally and by product.
July 14, 2025
Who Lends to Households and Firms?
The financial sector in the U.S. economy is deeply interconnected. In our previous post, we showed that incorporating information about this network of financial claims leads to a substantial reassessment of which financial sectors are ultimately financing the lending to the real sector as a whole (households plus nonfinancial firms). In this post, we delve deeper into the differences between the composition of lending to households and nonfinancial firms in terms of direct lending as well as the patterns of “adjusted lending” that we compute by accounting for the network of claims financial subsectors have on each other.
May 28, 2025
Who’s Paying Those Overdraft Fees?
One criticism of overdraft credit is that the fees seem borne disproportionately by low-income, Black, and Hispanic households. To investigate this concern, we surveyed around 1,000 households about their overdraft activity. Like critics, we find that these groups do tend to overdraft more often. However, when we control for respondents’ credit scores along with their socioeconomic characteristics, we discover that only their credit score predicts overdraft activity. While it’s not altogether surprising that credit constrained households overdrew more often, it’s noteworthy that socioeconomic characteristics did not help in predicting overdrafts. This more textured picture of overdraft activity helps inform the ongoing debate about overdraft credit and its users.
April 11, 2025
Recent Shifts Seen in Consumers’ Public Policy Expectations
In this post we examine changes in households’ beliefs following the release of the December 2024 SCE Public Policy Survey, finding large shifts in consumer expectations about future changes in fiscal policy. Households assign higher likelihoods to a variety of tax cuts and to reductions in a range of transfer programs, while they assign lower likelihoods to tax hikes and expansions in entitlement programs. We do not find these sharp changes translate into meaningful shifts in median households’ near-term expectations about the evolution of the overall economy, nor do they appear to have significantly affected median near-term expectations about the household’s own income and spending growth.
Posted at 7:00 am in Expectations, Fiscal Policy, Household Finance, Inflation, Student Loans | Permalink
RSS Feed
Follow Liberty Street Economics
