Inattentive decision makers do not make full use of information available to them. Existing, psychologically based, explanations for inattention include the impact of competing stimuli and the salience of the decision. These existing explanations, however, do not predict whether richer or poorer...

This article measures the impact of state laws on defaulting borrowers. Prior literature has assessed the impact of laws that limit the enforcement of judgments on bankruptcy filings. However, (1) the majority of defaulting consumers do not file for bankruptcy, and (2) most debt collection takes...

In this study, we explore the relationship between the debt service ratio (DSR) and individual borrowers' ability to withstand shocks in Malaysia. Using a micro-level dataset that matches borrowers' debt and income, we quantify the financial resilience of individual borrowers and subsequently...

We ask why so few student loan borrowers enroll in Income Driven Repayment when the majority would benefit from doing so. To do so we run an incentivized laboratory experiment using a facsimile of the government's Student Loan Exit Counseling website. We test the role information complexity,...

This paper argues that the debt forgiveness provided by the U.S. consumer bankruptcy system helped stabilize employment levels during the Great Recession. We document that over this period, states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions had significantly smaller declines in non-tradable...

In Gathergood et al. (2019), we studied credit card repayments using linked data on multiple cards from the United Kingdom. We showed that individuals did not allocate payments to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing, but instead made repayments according to...

In Gathergood et al. (forthcoming), we studied credit card repayments using linked data on multiple cards from the United Kingdom. We showed that individuals did not allocate payments to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing, but instead made repayments...

This paper studies the impact of a large debt relief program, intended to attenuate investment constraints among highly-indebted households in rural India. It isolates the causal effect of bankruptcy-like debt relief settlements using a natural experiment arising from India's Debt Relief Program...

A drawback of student loans is that a debtor must show “undue hardship” to discharge them in bankruptcy. An advantage of student loans is that most of them may be repaid using income-driven repayment (“IDR”) plans, under which the debtor can satisfy the obligation by paying a share of...