Consumers with a history of personal bankruptcy are not excluded from unsecured credit markets but face less favourable financing terms, a Federal Reserve paper, published in May, says.

The paper's authors, Song Han, Benjamin Keys and Geng Li, use a dataset on credit card mailings to explore the supply of unsecured credit to consumers with a high level of default risk such as those with a bankruptcy history.

They find that although bankruptcy filers do not face outright exclusion from credit