The key feature of the modern U.S. personal bankruptcy law is to provide debtors a financial fresh start through debt discharge. The primary justification for the discharge policy is to preserve human capital by maintaining incentives for work. In this paper, we test this fresh start argument by...

We examine the relationship between the nondefault component of corporate bond spreads and bond liquidity measures constructed from intraday transactions data, with the default component controlled by the term structure of credit default swaps (CDS) spreads. In doing so, we address both maturity...

I study the implications of creditor learning on the estimated racial disparity in the loan approval rate and derive testable hypotheses for detecting discrimination in lending. Utilizing the data used by Munnell et al. (1996), I find that the magnitude (in absolute value) of the racial...

In this paper, we use the recent collapse of the ARS market as the laboratory to study issues on the fragility of financial innovations and systemic risks. We find strong evidence of investor runs for liquidity - partly caused by a self-fulfilling panic - and coordination failures among major...

Some of the important implications of the parental investment model of intergenerational mobility have been derived under the assumption that parental income is the main source of heterogeneity. We explicitly model the variability and inheritability of innate' earnings ability and the...

We use a new panel data set on intraday transactions of triparty repos (TPR) to study trading relationships in the over-the-counter market. We test the prediction that search frictions lead to relationship formation. We find that TPR trading parties form relationships with a broad number of...

Using a general equilibrium model of credit market discrimination, I find that both taste-based discrimination and statistical discrimination have similar predictions for the intergroup differences in loan terms. The commonly held view has been that if taste-based discrimination exists, loans...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of both taste-based and statistical discrimination in credit markets. We find that both types of discrimination have similar predictions for intergroup differences in loan terms. The commonly held view has been that if there exists taste-based...

We use the recent collapse of the ARS market to study the fragility of financial innovations and systemic risks. We find strong evidence of investor runs and coordination failure among major broker-dealers in providing liquidity support. The two forces amplified each other dynamically, resulting...

In this paper, we use the recent collapse of the ARS market as the laboratory to study issues on the fragility of financial innovations and systemic risks. We find strong evidence of investor runs for liquidity - partly caused by a self-fulfilling panic - and coordination failures among major...