"In Bankrupt in America, Mary and Brad Hansen show that examination of how Americans have used bankruptcy law and the history of the law itself offers important perspective on the history of bankruptcy in America. Using new statistical and documentary evidence, they illustrate the cycles of...

We present a model of sovereign debt in which, contrary to conventional wisdom, government defaults are costly because they destroy the balance sheets of domestic banks. In our model, better financial institutions allow banks to be more leveraged, thereby making them more vulnerable to sovereign...

A book review of a history of bankruptcy in the United States told through an interdisciplinary lens of law, history and economics. The main contribution of this book is to evaluate changes in federal bankruptcy rates and bankruptcy law in relation to state collections law. Bankruptcy in America...

This paper studies the role of credit market competition in explaining consumer bankruptcy filings. I exploit variation in bank competition induced by large bank mergers to establish that personal bankruptcy rates are significantly higher in more competitive local banking markets. Higher...