The 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) is the most important reform of personal bankruptcy in the United States in recent years. This legislation overhauled eligibility requirements and increased monetary costs of filing for bankruptcy. Using administrative...

This paper examines how filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 13 helps financially distressed debtors save their homes. We develop a model of debtors' decisions to default on their mortgages and file for bankruptcy under Chapter 13 and evaluate the model using new data on Chapter 13 bankruptcy...

Consumer bankruptcy is one of the largest social insurance programs in the United States, but little is known about its impact on debtors. We use 500,000 bankruptcy filings matched to administrative tax and foreclosure data to estimate the impact of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on subsequent...

This paper presents evidence that public debts in the advanced economies have surged in recent years to levels not recorded since the end of World War II, surpassing the heights reached during the First World War and the Great Depression. At the same time, private debt levels, particularly those...

Financial innovations are a common explanation of the rise in consumer credit and bankruptcies. To evaluate this story, we develop a simple model that incorporates two key frictions: asymmetric information about borrowers' risk of default and a fixed cost to create each contract offered by...

Bankruptcy is the legal process by which the debts of firms, individuals, and occasionally governments in financial distress are resolved. Bankruptcy law always includes three components. First, it provides a collective framework for simultaneously resolving all debts of the bankrupt entity,...

Using administrative credit report records and data collected through several special household surveys we analyze changes in household debt and savings during the 2007 recession. We find that while different segments of the population were affected in distinct ways, depending on whether they...

We document cross-individual variation in U.S. credit card borrowing costs (APRs) that is large enough to explain substantial differences in household saving rates. Borrower default risk and card characteristics explain roughly 40% of APRs. The remaining dispersion exists because a borrower can...

U.S. households' debt skyrocketed between 2000 and 2007, and has been falling since. This leveraging (and deleveraging) cycle cannot be accounted for by the liberalization, and subsequent tightening, of credit standards in mortgage markets observed during the same period. We base this conclusion...