Buy now, pay later: credit for whom?
"Buy now, pay later" appears on just 8 recent papers across the tracked journals, although it has become one of the fastest-growing forms of consumer credit and is now being brought into credit reporting. Who uses it, does it crowd out or add to other borrowing, and does it lead to missed payments elsewhere?
What prompted this#
Since October 2025, "buy now pay later" appears on 8 papers in the archive, spread across finance, economics, management, operations research and AI journals, with 3 of them in July–September 2026. "Consumer credit" appears on 13. Credit scoring and household debt, by contrast, are well-established topics.
Questions#
- Do households that start using instalment plans at checkout spend more, and do they fall behind on other bills?
- Does access help people who are shut out of credit cards, or mainly people who already have them?
- Now that the main providers report to credit bureaus, do scores of frequent users rise or fall?
Data that could help#
Transaction-level data from banks or account aggregators, credit bureau records that now include instalment plans, and the dates of regulatory changes in the UK, Australia and the US.
Next step#
Use bank transaction data to identify new users of instalment plans and track their spending and late fees in the following six months.