We study the dynamic effect of the COVID-19 shock on credit card use in 2020. Local case incidence had a strong negative effect on credit card spending in the early months of the pandemic, which diminished over time. This time-varying pattern was driven by the fear of the virus, rather than government support programs, consistent with the “pandemic fatigue” of consumers. Local pandemic severity also had a strong effect on credit card repayments. These spending and repayment effects offset each other, resulting in no effect on credit card borrowing, consistent with credit-smoothing behavior. The local stringency of nonpharmaceutical interventions also had a negative effect on spending and repayments, albeit smaller in magnitude. We conclude that the pandemic itself was a more important driver of changes in credit card use than the public health policy response.

Retail banking is a complex industry in which depository institutions bundle various services and may have market power. We use a recent regulation as a natural experiment to provide broad evidence about competition and the importance of bundling in retail banking. That regulation, which resulted from the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd–Frank Act, capped debit card interchange fees for banks with over 10 billion in assets. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we document and quantify the resulting decline in interchange income for treated banks. We further find that treated banks offset more than 90% of the lost interchange income through increases in deposit fees for account holders. We argue that the ability to adjust deposit fees indicates (i) that treated banks have market power with respect to their account holders and (ii) strong complementarity between debit card transactions and deposit accounts. These results are robust when limiting the sample to banks near the asset threshold or using control banks with low direct competition with treated banks. Treated banks neither reduced costs nor strategically avoided the 10 billion threshold.

We examine the real effects of changes in bank mortgage loan underwriting standards by combining responses to the Federal Reserve’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, application information from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and local housing market measures over 1990 to 2013. Tightened standards are associated with a 1 percentage point increase in denial rates and a 5% fall in loan issuance, controlling for applicant pool changes, but no change for predominantly-securitizing banks. In areas with more exposure to banks that have tightened standards, mortgage delinquency rates, house prices, new home sales, and residential construction employment fall substantially.