The great expansion of 2019 and the delinquency rates of blacks and hispanics

ABSTRACT

During a period of increasing prosperity, the U.S. debt delinquency rate decreased between 2016 and 2019, with a relatively large decrease for Asians households and somewhat smaller decrease for Blacks and Whites, while the rate for Hispanics stayed constant. Blacks were more likely to be delinquent than Whites and Hispanics. Controlling for household characteristics, there was not a significant year effect for delinquency, suggesting that changes in household characteristics accounted for the overall decrease between 2016 and 2019. Additional analyses showed the Black delinquency rate in 2016 was not significantly different from the White rate, but was higher than the White rate in 2019. In both years, Hispanics had lower delinquency rates than Blacks. We discuss possible explanations for the differences between Hispanics and Blacks.

KEYWORDS:

• Delinquency
• race/ethnicity
• survey of consumer finances
• economic expansion

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D12
• D14
• J15

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Hanna, Kim, and Lindamood (2018) documented various methodological issues related to using Survey of Consumer Finances datasets.

² Full results of additional analyses are available upon the request.