Thousands of U.S. households filed for bankruptcy just before the bankruptcy law changed in 2005. That rush-to-file was more pronounced, we find, in states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions and lower credit scores. We take that finding as evidence that the new law effectively reduces...

We define predatory lending as a welfare-reducing provision of credit. Using a textbook model, we show that lenders profit if they can tempt households into “debt traps,” that is, overborrowing and delinquency. We then test whether payday lending fits our definition of predatory. We find...

Evidence in this paper suggests that a close banking relationship - a loan commitment in particularparticular, relax cash flow and cash management constraints on firms. Given firms' prospects (Q), the investment and cash flow correlation is substantially lower when firms have a bank loan...

The naming of eleven banks as “too big to fail (TBTF)” in 1984 led bond raters to raise their ratings on new bond issues of TBTF banks about a notch relative to those of other, unnamed banks. The relationship between bond spreads and ratings for the TBTF banks tended to flatten after that...