In diesem Beitrag wird gezeigt, dass kommunale und private Schulden in Deutschland räumlich ähnlich verteilt sind. Der Zusammenhang ist jedoch dann nicht mehr statistisch signifikant, wenn die lokale Arbeitslosenquote berücksichtigt wird. Dieses Ergebnis unterstreicht die Bedeutung des...

When facing financial distress, French households can file a case to a "households' over-indebtedness commission" (HDC). The HDC can order an immediate repayment or grant a debt suspension. Exploiting the random assignment of bankruptcy filings to managers, we show that a debt suspension has a...

This paper complements macroeconomic indicators for macroprudential policy with information from microeconomic survey data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), to identify pockets of risk in the Belgian mortgage market. It takes into account distributional aspects of debt...

Auto lenders were perhaps the biggest winners of the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform. Cars depreciate quickly, so borrowers often owe more than their car is worth. Prior to the Reform, these borrowers could reduce the principal on their auto loan to the market value of the car through a "cramdown" in...

This paper explores the willingness of entrepreneurs to pay for wealth insurance to protect personal assets in case of business failure and the impact of this strategy on small business operation decisions. I show that antidiscrimination laws allow married firm owners in half of U.S. states to...

Discussions on personal bankruptcy regulations are usually focused on the controversial effects of leniency on society, economy, financial markets, entrepreneurship, and labour supply. However, the methodology of measuring leniency has been limited to one-time legislative changes or some...

This paper examines empirically the effect of the level of personal bankruptcy protection in the US on households' demand for financial assets. A Chapter 7 bankruptcy allows protecting the home equity up to a certain limit or "exemption". Previous literature shows that such exemption biases...