Gajendran Raveendranathan

• Doctor of Philosophy
• McMaster University

We measure the distribution of welfare losses from non-competitive behavior in the U.S. credit card industry during the 1970s and 1980s. The early credit card industry was characterized by regional monopolies. Ensuing legal decisions led to competitive reforms that resulted in greater, but still limited, oligopolistic competition. We measure the di...

After decades of consistent growth, U.S. revolving credit declined drastically post 2009. We study the Ability to Pay provision of the Credit CARD Act of 2009, a policy that restricts credit card limits, as a contributing factor. Extending a model of revolving credit lines, we find that the policy accounts for 54–60% of the decline in revolving cre...

We study trade disruptions at different stages of development in a two‐country, three‐sector model of Spain and United Kingdom from 1850 to 2000. The impact of trade disruptions depends on trade openness and the productivity gap between countries. A trade collapse today (more openness, less gap) comparable to the Inter‐War Trade Collapse (IWTC) dec...

In the United States, one in three students enrolled in a bachelor's degree program eventually drops out, and the stock of student loans held by these dropouts is sizable. We establish empirically that college students and their parents are overly optimistic about the probability of college graduation when making college enrollment decisions. We in...

We show how a rate cap can be designed to improve both consumer and lender welfare in the credit card market. We analyze transition paths resulting from different rate caps in a model with revolving credit lines, search frictions, and lender market power. Our analysis shows that if a rate cap only applies to new credit card issuance and not existin...

We analyze aggregate shocks in a general equilibrium model of firm dynamics with entry and exit and financial frictions. Compared to the productivity shock, a shock to the collateral constraint (credit shock) generates a larger change in firm entry and exit. Calibrating the credit and productivity shocks to the Great Recession, we find that the cre...

The introduction of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) in the 1940s led to the largest decline in the uninsurance rate in U.S. history. To study the fiscal and welfare implications of this insurance expansion, we endogenize the selection of workers into jobs with and without ESI in a general equilibrium life-cycle model where consumers face idiosyn...

I propose a model of revolving credit lines and targeted search to analyze what accounts for the profitability of the U.S. credit card industry. My analyses lead to two main findings. First, the search friction has minimal impact on the level of profitability of the credit card industry. Most of the profitability is a result of the lender choosing...

Revolving credit in the U.S. declined drastically in the last decade after several years of upward trending growth. We show that the Ability to Pay provision of the Credit CARD Act of 2009, which places restrictions on credit card limits, accounts for this decline. Extending a model of revolving credit to analyze this policy, we account for changes...

We develop an overlapping generations general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy with heterogeneous consumers who face idiosyncratic earnings and health risk to study the implications of increasing college attainment, decreasing fertility, and increasing longevity (2005–2100). While all three trends contribute to a higher old age dependency rati...

I propose a model of revolving credit lines and targeted search where credit card firms issue long-term contracts specified by a credit limit and interest rate to heterogeneous consumers. The model accounts for income and life cycle profiles of various credit card market variables. Using the model to adjust for default risk, I show that consumers w...

We study the impact of trade on a country catching up to the industrial leader. We calibrate our dynamic, two-country model to Spain and UK from 1850 to 2000, accounting for the inter-war trade collapse (IWTC) and the subsequent catch up by Spain. In our model, the effects of trade disruptions are stronger with more distance to the leader and more...

We use firm dynamics statistics on employment by age, entry, exit, and job flows to identify sources of business cycle fluctuations in the U.S. economy since 1980. We extend the Hopenhayn (1992) firm dynamics model by incorporating capital and debt accumulation to the firm's problem and savings to the consumer's problem. Analyzing the implications...

This paper develops an overlapping generations model to study the macroeconomic effects of an unexpected elimination of Medicare. We find that a large share of the elderly respond by substituting Medicaid for Medicare. Consequently, the government saves only 46 cents for every dollar cut in Medicare spending. We argue that a comparison of steady st...