MODELING THE NUMBER OF CREDIT CARDS HELD BY ITALIAN HOUSEHOLDS: A PANEL DATA APPROACH

Credit cards, both as mean of payment and borrowing, rise many economic issues. Firstly, the credit card industry can be viewed as a two-sided network industry characterized by externalities that could harm competition. Particularly, the fact that consumers hold or use credit cards from multiple networks is known as 'multi-homing' and in some theoretical models is of great importance in determining the outcome of the industry. Moreover, some studies show that the multiple credit cards can be seen as a device to access to more financing, making family bankruptcy more likely. In this paper we model the number of credit cards held by a panel of Italian household over the period 1991-2010 using demographic, socioeconomic and geographical variables as potential predictors and panel data techniques for count data. Our estimates show that such variables are suitable in explaining the credit card ownership.