The 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act limited homestead exemptions and imposed means test to discourage petitioners seeking financial benefits. We find that these restrictions were effective in steering petitioners away from Chapter 7 filings and into Chapter 13.

This paper derives closed-form and numerical solutions for relative risk aversion in a standard consumption-based model enriched with housing. The presence of housing enables the household to hedge against unexpected shocks and may decrease relative risk aversion. In addition, housing may...

Movements in house prices and consumer spending are closely correlated in many developed nations. Much debate exists on whether this relationship is causal arising from either wealth effects or via borrowing constraints. This paper uses a unique survey question on consumer responses to house...

This article examines the effects of a tax on vacant dwellings. I use a search equilibrium model in which the distribution of rent is the result of the owners’ posting strategy. I show that this tax reduces the number of vacant dwellings and increases the average rent.

We provide simple examples to illustrate how wealth-driven selection works in asset markets. Our examples deliver both good and bad news. The good news is that if individual assets demands are expressed as a fractions of wealth to be invested in each asset, e.g. because traders maximize an...

In a complete market for short-lived assets, we investigate long run wealth-driven selection on a general class of investment rules that depend on endogenously determined current and past prices. We find that market instability, leading to asset mis-pricing and informational efficiencies, is a...

We consider an exchange economy with heterogeneous agents and multiple assets and investigate the coupled dynamics of assets' prices and agents' wealth. We assume that agents have heterogeneous beliefs and invest on each asset a fraction of wealth proportional to its expected dividends. Our main...

We study how network structure affects the dynamics of collateral in presence of rehypothecation. We build a simple model wherein banks interact via chains of repo contracts and use their proprietary collateral or re-use the collateral obtained by other banks via reverse repos. In this...

In this paper I study the relationship between rationality and asset prices when agents have heterogeneous and incorrect beliefs about future events. Using the fully rational pricing as a benchmark, I show that when agents behave according to the Subjective Generalized Kelly rule (Bottazzi et...

We consider a repeated betting market populated by two agents who wage on a binary event according to generic betting strategies. We derive new simple criteria to establish the relative wealth of the two agents in the long run, only based on the odds they believe fair and how much they would bet...