We explore the role of defaults and choice architecture on student loan decision-making, experimentally testing the impact pre-populating either decline or accept decisions compared to an active choice, no pre-population, decision. We demonstrate that the default choice presented does influence...

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...

Compiling new liability-level data from the balance sheets of personal bankruptcy filers, we document that a sizable share of reported liabilities are "shadow debt," debt not reported to credit bureaus that often arises from the non-payment of goods and services. We use this new data to evaluate...

We study whether savings nudges have the unintended consequence of additional borrowing in high-interest credit. We use data from a pre-registered experiment that encouraged 3.1 million bank customers to save via SMS messages and train a machine learning algorithm to predict individual-level...

We specify and estimate a lifecycle model of consumption, housing demand and labor supply in an environment where individuals may file for bankruptcy or default on their mortgage. Uncertainty in the model is driven by house price shocks, {education specific} productivity shocks, and catastrophic...

We follow a representative panel of US borrowers to study the suspension of household debt payments (debt forbearance) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between March and October of 2020, loans worth $2 trillion entered forbearance. On average, cumulative payments missed per individual in...

This paper uses monthly zip code-level data on electricity disconnections to document the socioeconomic correlates of extreme economic distress among 5 million customers in Illinois. In 2018-2019, customers in Black and Hispanic zip codes were about 4 times more likely to be disconnected for...

Financial innovation and overconfidence about asset values and the riskiness of new financial products were important factors behind the U.S. credit crisis. We show that a boom-bust cycle in debt, asset prices and consumption characterizes the equilibrium dynamics of a model with a collateral...

Using individual-level data on homeowner debt and defaults from 1997 to 2008, we show that borrowing against the increase in home equity by existing homeowners is responsible for a significant fraction of both the sharp rise in U.S. household leverage from 2002 to 2006 and the increase in...

The initial implementation of the System of National Accounts (1993) for the United States by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve Board has two significant advantages for economists. First, the SNA are organized according to sectors of the economy defined by economic agents:...