The effect of government cash assistance on household credit access and use

Grant description:

This team of young, promising applied economists seeks to quantify how public assistance affects households’ financial well-being through increasing access to credit. We know little about the interactions between social safety net programs and the financial well-being of families. This paper uses a credible and proven research design to provide new evidence to better our understanding of the role of credit markets in the lives of the poor. By matching individual credit data to administrative data, the authors will estimate the effects of removing low-income youth with disabilities from Supplemental Security Income on credit access, secured borrowing, and payday loan borrowing for the youth and their families. There is great interest in this broad subject, and precious few ways to tease out causal impacts. Yet with cutting-edge methods and use of administrative data, the authors will attempt to do so.