Thousands of U.S. households filed for bankruptcy just before the bankruptcy law changed in 2005. That rush-to-file was more pronounced, we find, in states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions and lower credit scores. We take that finding as evidence that the new law effectively reduces...

Price dispersion among commodity goods is typically attributed to consumer search costs. We explore the magnitude of consumer search costs using a data set obtained from a major Internet shopbot. For the median consumer, the benefits to searching lower screens are $2.24 while the cost of an...

While bank capital requirements permit a bank to freely substitute between equity and subordinated debt, lenders and investors view debt and equity as imperfect substitutes. It follows that, after controlling for the level of regulatory capital, the mix of debt in capital isolates the role that...

Shadow banks conduct credit intermediation without direct, explicit access to public sources of liquidity and credit guarantees. Shadow banks contributed to the credit boom in the early 2000s and collapsed during the financial crisis of 2007-09. We review the rapidly growing literature on shadow...

We employ a unique data set of public commercial real estate (CRE) bonds issued during the Great Depression era (1920-32) to determine their frequency of default and total loss given default. Default rates on these bonds far exceeded those originated in subsequent periods, driven in part by the...

Shadow banks conduct credit intermediation without direct, explicit access to public sources of liquidity and credit guarantees. Shadow banks contributed to the credit boom in the early 2000s and collapsed during the financial crisis of 2007–2009. We review the quickly growing literature on...

We examine the effect of teenage childbearing on the adult outcomes of a sample of women who gave birth, miscarried or had an abortion as teenagers. If miscarriages are (conditionally) random, then if all miscarriages occur before teenagers can obtain abortions, using the absence of a...

We study a production economy with multiple sectors financed by issuing securities to agents who face capital constraints. Binding capital constraints propagate business cycles, and a reduction of the interest rate can increase the required return of high-haircut assets since it can increase the...

Many have claimed that credit default swaps (CDSs) have lowered the cost of debt financing to firms by creating new hedging opportunities and information for investors. This paper evaluates the impact that the onset of CDS trading has on the spreads that underlying firms pay to raise funding in...