Consumption, Credit, and the Missing Young

There are more young adults today with either no credit history or insufficient credit history to be scored by one of the major credit bureaus than there were before the Great Recession-a reality that is likely an outcome of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009-10. In regressions that include a rich set of controls, we show that measures of young adults missing a credit score in credit bureau data act as a drag on state-level consumption growth. We demonstrate that this effect is driven by young people's loss of access to credit since the legislation went into effect.