Consumer advocates won a victory with the passage of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. (Credit Card Act). The Credit Card Act bans certain pricing practices that were confusing to credit card users. Ironically, the seeds of this legislative victory may...

The recent financial crisis has led to calls for a better understanding of the reasons behind the increase in mortgage defaults and the foreclosures that followed. Previous studies using option-based mortgage default models predicted that borrowers should immediately exercise the default option...

In 2005, reforms made formal personal bankruptcy much more costly. Shortly after, the US began to experience its most severe recession in seventy years, and while personal bankruptcy rates rose, they rose only modestly given the severity of the rise in unemployment. By contrast, informal default...

In this paper, we use a systems-based analysis to identify the systemic drivers of individual bankruptcies in Australia and compare the results with a similar analysis of global corporate credit defaults that found uncontrollable factors were significant. We include both macro-economic factors...