We study the effects of fiscal policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the firm, sector, country and global level. First, we estimate the impact of COVID-19 and policy responses on small and medium sized enterprise (SME) business failures. We combine firm-level financial data from 50...

We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost-minimization and measure each firm's liquidity shortfall during and after...

Social distancing restrictions and demand shifts from COVID-19 are expected to shutter many small businesses, but there is very little early evidence on impacts. This paper provides the first analysis of impacts of the pandemic on the number of active small businesses in the United States using...

Mortgage cramdown enabled bankruptcy judges to discharge the underwater portion of a mortgage during Chapter 13 bankruptcy before the Supreme Court disallowed this practice in 1993. We exploit the random assignment of cases to judges to quantify the ex-post effects of Chapter 13 bankruptcy over...

This paper presents a theoretical model to describe the effects of default risk on international lending to LDC sovereign borrowers. The threat of defaults in international lending is shown to give rise to many characteristics of the syndicated loan market: (1) quantity rationing of loans; (2)...

This paper argues that the debt forgiveness provided by the U.S. consumer bankruptcy system helped stabilize employment levels during the Great Recession. We document that over this period, states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions had significantly smaller declines in non-tradable...

A more generous consumer bankruptcy system provides greater insurance against financial risks, but it may also raise the cost of credit to consumers. We study this trade-off using the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), which raised the costs of filing for...

We ask why so few student loan borrowers enroll in Income Driven Repayment when the majority would benefit from doing so. To do so we run an incentivized laboratory experiment using a facsimile of the government's Student Loan Exit Counseling website. We test the role information complexity,...

We propose a broad measure of liquidity for the overall financial market by exploiting its connection with the amount of arbitrage capital in the market and the potential impact on price deviations in US Treasurys. When arbitrage capital is abundant, we expect the arbitrage forces to smooth out...

The crisis of 2007-09 has been characterized by a sudden freeze in the market for short-term, secured borrowing. We present a model that can explain a sudden collapse in the amount that can be borrowed against finitely-lived assets with little credit risk. The borrowing in this model takes the...