We study how credit scoring impacts the ability of individuals to consumption smooth. Our environment has ex-ante heterogeneity of household types. Credit scoring is interpreted as an intermediary's posterior of a household's type conditional on its bankruptcy and borrowing decisions. The...

bankruptcy filing months later. While we possess reasonably sophisticated models of household default, we do not possess a comparably sophisticated model about the timing of a delinquent household's filing decision. The purpose of this project is to provide such a model and use it understand the...

We propose a theory of firm dynamics in which workers have ideas for new projects that can be sold in a market to existing firms or, at a cost, implemented in new firms: spin-offs. Workers have private information about the quality of their ideas. Because of an adverse selection problem, workers...

We propose a theory of unsecured debt that is based on the existence of private information about a person's type and on the fact that some debtors have the incentive to forego bankruptcy in order to signal their type. The theory formalizes the idea that the type of a person is relevant to...

Why does the level of economic activity vary so much across space? One reason given is "agglomeration economies," meaning that a firm's or household's production costs (of market and home goods, respectively) are lower when production is carried out in close proximity to other firms and...

What implications does land supply elasticity have for land price appreciation in cities that are experiencing population or productivity growth? In the setting of a circular city model with a production externality, we show that residential land prices grow faster in the city that can expand...

gain on housing leads to offsetting movements in downpayments, with little or no change in equilibrium default frequency.

Why are taxes higher in Europe than in the US? We propose that it stems from lesser competition across jurisdictions within Europe. We embed self-interested governments and tax competition into a standard neoclassical growth model with public goods. While greater jurisdictional competition...

future (so-called debt dilution problem).

Under current law, participants in (college) student loan program must repay their loan in full regardless of whether they complete college. Dropout rate among college students from low-income background is anywhere between 33 to 50 percent. The combination of lack of family resources,...