U.S. consumers hold trillions of dollars in debt, but they hold it very unevenly. “If you work with credit data and outcomes in the U.S., you see this tremendous variation both across states and within states,” says Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, an assistant professor of finance at Yale SOM. “There are a lot of reasons for that, but one interesting thing is how variation in health insurance looks similar to variation in debt.”
