Compiling new liability-level data from the balance sheets of personal bankruptcy filers, we document that a sizable share of reported liabilities are "shadow debt," debt not reported to credit bureaus that often arises from the non-payment of goods and services. We use this new data to evaluate...

Despite growing interest in expectation surveys, critics argue that survey responses are not reliable measures of the expectations underlying financial decisions, and empirical work often finds only a weak correlation between investment and stated beliefs. In this paper, we document a systematic...