Because of the recent surge in U.S. personal defaults, Congress is currently debating bankruptcy reform legislation requiring a means test for Chapter 7 filers. This paper explores the effects of such a reform in a model where, in contrast to previous work, bankruptcy options and production are...

We show that binomial economies with financial assets are an informative and tractable model to study endogenous leverage and collateral equilibrium: endogenous leverage can be highly volatile, but it is always easy to compute. The possibility of default can have a dramatic effect on...