countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data? Yes, it does, but only if we explicitly model recessions as displaying … bankruptcy risk discouraging households from using credit. This finding contradicts the intuition that access to credit helps …

consumer bankruptcy filers. In particular, the authors’ data allow them to distinguish between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 … bankruptcy filings, to observe changes in credit demand and credit supply explicitly, and to differentiate existing and new … credit accounts. The paper has four main findings. First, despite speedy recovery in their risk scores after bankruptcy …

Bankruptcy reform in 2005 eliminated debtors’ ability to discharge private student loan debt in bankruptcy. This law … bankruptcy even if they had sufficient income to service their debt. Using a unique, nationally representative sample of … anonymized credit bureau files, we examine the bankruptcy filing and delinquency rates of private student loan borrowers in …

What are the positive and normative implications of eliminating bankruptcy protection for indebted individuals? Without … bankruptcy protection, creditors can collect on defaulted debt to the extent permitted by wage garnishment laws. The elimination …

By compiling a novel dataset from bankruptcy court dockets recorded in Delaware between 2001 and 2002, we build and … estimate a structural model of Chapter 13 bankruptcy. This allows us to quantify how key debtor characteristics, including … whether they are experiencing bankruptcy for the first time, their past due secured debt at the time of filing, and income in …

The 1990's witnessed a historically unprecedented number of personal bankruptcy filings. In response, congressional … debate over bankruptcy law has recently led to several proposals aimed at making it more difficult to exempt wealth in … bankruptcy. In this paper, I evaluate uniform exemption policy primarily within the context of the recent congressional proposal …

In U.S. data, income interruptions, the receipt of public insurance, and the incidence of personal bankruptcy are all … closely related. The central contribution of this paper is to evaluate both bankruptcy protection and public insurance in a … delivers two striking conclusions. First, we find that U.S. personal bankruptcy law is an important barrier to allowing the …

Because of the recent surge in U.S. personal defaults, Congress is currently debating bankruptcy reform legislation … previous work, bankruptcy options and production are explicitly taken into account. Our findings indicate that means testing … would not improve upon current bankruptcy provisions and, at best, leaves aggregate filings, output, and welfare unchanged …