A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This has forced researchers to adopt a variety of indirect approaches. This paper...

In this paper, we investigate how personal bankruptcy law affects small firms' access to credit. When a firm is unincorporated, its debts are personal liabilities of the firm's owner, so that lending to the firm is legally equivalent to lending to its owner. If the firm fails, the owner has an...

An employee's annual earnings fall by 10% the year her firm files for bankruptcy and fall by a cumulative present value of 67% over seven years. This effect is more pronounced in thin labor markets and among small firms that are ultimately liquidated. Compensating wage differentials for this...

This paper examines demand systems where the demand for a good depends only on its own price, consumer income, and a single aggregator synthesizing information on all other prices. This generalizes directly-separable preferences where the Lagrange multiplier provides such an aggregator. As...

This paper examines demand systems where the demand for a good depends on other prices only through a common price aggregator (a scalar function of all prices). We refer to this property as ``generalized separability'' and provide the functional forms of demand that this property implies when...

Despite the promise of FinTech lending to expand access to credit to populations without a formal credit history, FinTech lenders primarily lend to applicants with a formal credit history and rely on conventional credit bureau scores as an input to their algorithms. Using data from a large...

We use yield spreads to construct ex-ante returns on corporate securities, and then use the ex-ante returns in asset pricing assets. Differently from the standard approach, our tests do not use ex-post average returns as a proxy for expected returns. We find that the market beta plays a much...