The 30-year fixed-rate fully amortizing mortgage (or "traditional fixed-rate mortgage") was a substantial innovation when first developed during the Great Depression. However, it has three major flaws. First, because homeowner equity accumulates slowly during the first decade, homeowners are...

Using a novel data set, we study the soft information in subprime mortgages that is not verifiable by a third party, and its relationship with mortgage default. We find that lender effort to collect soft information is intertwined with borrower self-selection into subprime mortgages. We employ...

In dynamic models of asset markets with asymmetric information and endogenous screening, the anticipation of signaling through delayed sales incentivizes originators to exert greater effort ex ante. A central prediction in those models is a positive relationship between screening effort and the...

What are the positive and normative implications of eliminating bankruptcy protection for indebted individuals? Without bankruptcy protection, creditors can collect on defaulted debt to the extent permitted by wage garnishment laws. The elimination lowers the default premium on unsecured debt...

The fundamental freedoms of the EC Treaty prohibit tax discrimination - harsher tax treatment of cross-border economic activities than purely internal activities. Critics of the ECJ argue that the Court's broad interpretation of the EC freedoms causes it to find tax discrimination where there is...

Under the standard the European Court of Justice (ECJ) uses to evaluate tax discrimination cases, a Member State discriminates when it taxes cross-border economic activities more than “similar” purely domestic activities. To determine when this occurs, the ECJ compares the complaining...

The activities of third-party debt collectors affect millions of borrowers. However, relatively little is known about their impact on consumer credit. To study this issue, I investigate whether state debt collection laws affect the ability of third-party debt collectors to recover delinquent...

I develop an equilibrium model of housing and default to jointly analyze the effects of bankruptcy and foreclosure policies. Heterogeneous households have access to mortgages and unsecured credit and can default separately on both types of debt. I show that the interaction between foreclosure...

Because theory suggests that businesses will wait too long to file voluntarily, current scholarship asks whether bankruptcy should offer larger rewards to managers and shareholders to induce them to file earlier. Although creditors could force firms into bankruptcy sooner by filing involuntary...

Taking advantage of granular data we measure the change in bank capital requirement resulting from the implementation of AI techniques to predict corporate defaults. For each of the largest banks operating in France we design an algorithm to build pseudo-internal models of credit risk management...