This paper finds strong evidence that many individuals choose to pay credit card bills even at the cost of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures. While the popular press and some recent literature have suggested that this choice may emerge from steep declines in housing prices, we find...

As Chari et al (2008) point out in a recent paper, aggregate trends are very hard to interpret. They examine four common claims about the impact of financial sector phenomena on the economy and conclude that all four claims are myths. We argue that to evaluate these popular claims, one needs to...

This paper will discuss a proposed method for the estimation of loss distribution using information from a combination of internally derived data and data from external sources. The relevant context for this analysis is the estimation of operational loss distributions used in the calculation of...

Using a unique dataset composed of female employees at a large medical organization, this paper explores the role of social interactions among female co-workers and neighbors in the decision to obtain breast cancer screening exams. In our theoretical framework, the experience of other women is...

The reintroduction of capital punishment after the end of the Supreme Court moratorium has permitted researchers to employ state level heterogeneity in the use of capital punishment to study deterrent effects. However, no scholarly consensus exists as to their magnitude. A key reason this has...

As empirical work in identifying social effects becomes more prevalent, researchers are beginning to struggle with identifying the composition of social interactions within any given reference group. In this paper, we present a simple econometric methodology for the separate identification of...

Using a large sample of individual credit information provided by a US credit bureau, this paper investigates the empirical relevance of stigma and information sharing on household bankruptcy and its trend. Many observers of bankruptcy patterns have conjectured that there exists an increased...

In this paper, we study the role of the credit channel of monetary policy in a synthesis model of the economy. Through the use of a well-specified banking sector and a regulatory capital constraint on lending, we provide an alternate mechanism that can potentially explain the periods of...

This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on the causes of consumer bankruptcy. It presents the consumer bankruptcy decision as an irreversible choice that has an embedded real option value. This allows the use of well known framework for the study of decision making under...

Conventional wisdom about individuals who have gone bankrupt is that they find it very difficult to get credit for at least some time after their bankruptcy. However, there is very little non-survey based empirical evidence on the availability of credit post-bankruptcy. This paper makes two...