Both personal bankruptcy and redistributive taxes can insure households’ consumption risk and both vary considerably across US states. We derive sufficient conditions under which more redistributive taxation makes bankruptcy exemptions less attractive both for the intratemporal insurance and...

How does the punishment for default affect repayment behavior? We use administrative data provided by the leading Italian lender of unsecured credit to the household sector to investigate the effect of two potentially important factors: judicial efficiency and the availability of informal credit...

Increasing marginal tax rates and making payments to the poor reduce inequality and introduce savings dis-incentives. Using a heterogeneous agent model with incomplete markets, we show that higher taxes (and transfers) decrease consumption inequality but also mean savings and mean consumption....

Academic research and policy discussions of credit markets usually focus on borrowing by firms and producers rather than by households, which are typically analyzed in terms of their savings and portfolio choices. The Economics of Consumer Credit brings together leading international researchers...