New Papers From The Philadelphia Fed Payment Cards Center

• Another Look at Credit Card Pricing and Its Disclosure: Is the Semi-Annual Pricing Data Reported by Credit Card Issuers to the Fed Helpful to Consumers or Researchers? (PDF), examines credit card pricing as presented in the semiannual guide that the Board of Governors publishes pursuant to the Truth in Lending Act. Specifically, PCC researchers Mark Furletti and Christopher Ody ask two questions: Are the data on credit card pricing in the guide useful to consumers? Are the data collected for the guide (commonly know as Terms of Credit Card Plan [TCCP] data) of value to researchers? With respect to both of these questions, the authors find that the data are becoming less useful.

• Prepaid Cards: An Important Innovation in Financial Services (PDF), was written by Julia S. Cheney of the PCC and Sherrie L.W. Rhine of the Office of Regional and Community Affairs at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This paper describes the characteristics of closed-system and open-system prepaid cards, particularly focusing on a class of open-system programs that offer a set of features similar to conventional deposit accounts using card-based payment applications. Using these cards, consumers can pay bills, make purchases, and get cash from ATM networks without the need for securing a traditional banking relationship.
  
  
• Perspectives on Recent Trends in Consumer Debt (PDF), by Andrew Kish of the Supervision, Regulation, and Credit Department, offers a brief overview and analysis of the key economic variables used to evaluate consumer debt levels. The paper provides a review of the literature on consumer debt to create a framework for how to assess recent credit trends. Three common explanations for credit growth (the democratization of credit, increased convenience use of credit, and increased homeownership) are evaluated in terms of their contribution to overall credit growth. The paper concludes that while these three trends have all played some part in increasing credit outstanding, there are clearly other significant factors contributing to the increase in consumer debt over time.