Regulation of investor access to financial products is often based on product familiarity indicated by previous use. The underlying premise that lack of familiarity with a product class causes unwarranted participation is difficult to test. This paper uses household-level data from the...

Household access to financial products is often conditioned on previous use. However, banning access when learning is possible may be discriminatory or counterproductive. The 'experiment' of German reunification (exogenously) offered to East Germans unconditional access to (exogenously)...

We study determinants of households' unsecured credit limits using the Survey of Consumer Finances between 2001 and 2016. We estimate the marginal effects of demographic characteristics and financial health conditions in a two stage least squares model, resolving the endogeneity from the...

This paper considers the causes of the rise in US household debt since the early 1970s using a calibrated partial equilibrium overlapping generations model. The model explains indebtedness in terms of a consumption-income motive, associated with consumption smoothing, and a housing-finance...

Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...

Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data for the period 1996 to...

Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...

Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...

Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the main debt relief program for U.S. households, provides more than $150 billion in debt relief each year, yet its impact on consumers remains unclear. Using unique hand-collected data from individual bankruptcy petitions, I employ a regression discontinuity design to...

To gain understanding on the role of institutional factors on households' demand for risky financial assets, this paper examines empirically the impact of the level of personal bankruptcy provisions in the US. Chapter 7 allows protecting the home equity in bankruptcy up to a certain limit or...