Consumer bankruptcy laws, which vary across states and over time, permit debtors to keep assets below a statutory exemption while debts are forgiven. High exemptions distort household portfolio decisions and tempt households to default on debts; but they also provide a crude form of consumption...

Governments use monetary policies to counteract the effects of financial crises. In this paper we examine the subsidy that such quot;safety netquot; policies provide to the banking industry. Using a model of uncertainty-driven financial crises, we show that any monetary policy designed to...

I study the effect of improved financial intermediation on the process of capital accumulation by augmenting a standard model with a general contract space. With the extra contracts, intermediaries endogenously begin using ROSCAs, or Rotating Savings and Credit Associations. These contracts...

This paper explores the question of whether market participants could have or should have anticipated the large increase in foreclosures that occurred in 2007 and 2008. Most of these foreclosures stem from loans originated in 2005 and 2006, leading many to suspect that lenders originated a large...

We define a measure to be a financial vulnerability if, in a VAR framework that allows for nonlinearities, an impulse to the measure leads to an economic contraction. We evaluate alternative macrofinancial imbalances as vulnerabilities: nonfinancial sector credit, risk appetite of financial...

This article describes the background, design choices and particular details of stress tests used as part of an overall supervisory regime; that is, their formal integration into the process of the ongoing prudential supervision of banks and other large financial institutions. We then describe...