Using a comprehensive panel dataset on U.S. households, we study the effects of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), the most substantive reform of personal bankruptcy in the United States since the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. The 2005 legislation...

By compiling a novel data set from bankruptcy court dockets recorded in Delaware between 2001 and 2002, the authors build and estimate a structural model of Chapter 13 bankruptcy. This allows them to quantify how key debtor characteristics, including whether they are experiencing bankruptcy for...

Wage garnishment allows private and public creditors to pull money directly out of a worker's paycheck to repay defaulted debt. Despite growing public concern surrounding the effects of strict debt collection mechanisms, a dearth of data has precluded empirical examination of the prevalence of...

We analyze the effect of import competition on household balance sheets from 2000 to 2007 using individual data on consumer finances. We exploit variation in exposure to foreign competition using industry-level shipping costs and initial differences in regions' industry specialization. We show...

Financial innovations are a common explanation of the rise in consumer credit and bankruptcies. To evaluate this story, we develop a simple model that incorporates two key frictions: asymmetric information about borrowers' risk of default and a fixed cost to create each contract offered by...

We build a structural model of Chapter 13 bankruptcy that captures salient features of personal bankruptcy under Chapter 13. We estimate our model using a novel data set that we construct from bankruptcy court dockets recorded in Delaware in 2001 and 2002. Our estimation results highlight the...

This testimony addresses the proposal of the Obama Administration to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) which would have the authority to issue and enforce new regulations related to consumer lending products. This testimony criticizes the proposal on three grounds. First,...

Most research studying family financial behavior of racial/ethnic groups has ignored Asian households or arbitrarily combined them with other racial/ethnic groups. We treated Asian households as a separate racial/ethnic group to compare twelve financial behaviors and attitudes of Asian...

This paper examines the usefulness of logit regression in forecasting the consumer bankruptcy of households using an imbalanced dataset. The research on consumer bankruptcy prediction is of paramount importance as it aims to build statistical models that can identify consumers in a difficult...