Since the price peak in 2006, home values have fallen more than 30%, leaving millions of Americans with negative equity in their homes. Until the Supreme Court's 1993 decision in Nobelman v. American Savings Bank, the bankruptcy system would have provided many such homeowners with a remedy. They...

The availability of credit insurance via credit default swaps (CDSs) has been closely associated with the emergence of empty creditors. We empirically investigate this issue by looking at the debt restructurings (distressed exchanges and bankruptcy filings) of rated, non-financial U.S. companies...