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...

Recent evidence suggests that households' access to credit has improved. If households can vary labor supply in response to stochastic productivity shocks, changes in credit markets can be expected to alter not only savings and borrowing behavior, but also labor effort. The purpose of this...

This article takes a first step in evaluating a commonly used assumption in recent quantitative analyses of unsecured household borrowing -- the temporary exclusion of defaulting borrowers from credit markets. Exclusion from credit markets is an attractive modeling device for tractably modeling...