3 posts on "credit reports"
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.
May 19, 2021
Small Business Owners Turn to Personal Credit
In our first post in this series we showed that mortgage provisions under the CARES ACT and its subsequent extensions resulted in a rapid take-up of mortgage forbearances, under which borrowers had the option to pause or reduce debt service payments without inducing a delinquency notation on their credit reports. Here we examine the forbearance take-up rate of a group of mortgage borrowers we expect to have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic recession: small business owners. Relatively little is known about how small business owners have fared over the past year in terms of their personal finances. Were they able to continue making mortgage payments on their homes? Did they draw on home equity to help fund their business operations?
Posted at 11:47 am | Permalink
August 14, 2018
Just Released: Cleaning Up Collections
Household debt balances continued their upward trend in the second quarter, with increases in mortgage, auto, and credit card balances, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. Student loans were roughly flat, a typical seasonal pattern in the second quarter. The Quarterly Report contains summaries of the types of information that is covered in credit reports, sourced from the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel (CCP). The CCP is based on anonymized Equifax credit reports and is the source for the analysis provided in this post, which focuses on an area that until recently has received little attention: collections accounts.
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