bankruptcy to clarify the circumstances in which exclusion is, or is not, likely to be an innocuous simplification. We then … rise of household debt and personal bankruptcy …

A comparison of models and results from selected papers on personal bankruptcy establishes how particular modeling … assumptions matter for the implications of bankruptcy. For example, it can be argued that only under income processes that allow … for large shocks to net worth can bankruptcy play a role in improving welfare. However, despite the progress evident from …

Many believe that bankruptcy was more painful in the past than now and that the stigma associated with bankruptcy has … declined. But a model in which bankruptcy affects both demand and supply in the unsecured credit market suggests otherwise. The … model shows that a decrease in stigma, while leading to increases in bankruptcy rates, yields implications for the growth of …

As an implicit form of insurance, bankruptcy may augment, substitute for, or limit other forms of insurance. Conversely …, the presence of other forms of insurance may enhance or limit the usefulness of bankruptcy. An investigation of the … bankruptcy system reveals several findings. First, in the benchmark economy, introducing bankruptcy under even low UI replacement …

The 1990's witnessed a historically unprecedented number of personal bankruptcy filings. In response, congressional … debate over bankruptcy law has recently led to several proposals aimed at making it more difficult to exempt wealth in … bankruptcy. In this paper, I evaluate uniform exemption policy primarily within the context of the recent congressional proposal …

In U.S. data, income interruptions, the receipt of public insurance, and the incidence of personal bankruptcy are all … closely related. The central contribution of this paper is to evaluate both bankruptcy protection and public insurance in a … delivers two striking conclusions. First, we find that U.S. personal bankruptcy law is an important barrier to allowing the …

Because of current bankruptcy law, the growth in unsecured credit in the two decades since the 1978 Marquette Supreme … to maximize the benefits of both plentiful unsecured credit and lax bankruptcy law. Even exclusive concern for wealth … redistribution provides no self-evident justification for lax bankruptcy law in the face of an expansion in unsecured credit. The …

The two channels of default on unsecured consumer debt are (i) bankruptcy, which legally grants partial or complete … of both bankruptcy and delinquency. Our model yields three new findings: First, with respect to the choice between … bankruptcy and delinquency, labor income shocks matter. Specifically, we find delinquency is readily used by borrowers with the …