We study the effect of debtor protection on business dynamism. We find that greater debtor protection, in the form of more lenient personal bankruptcy laws, increases firm entry only in sectors requiring low startup capital. We also find that debtor protection increases firm exit and job...

We exploit state-level changes in the amount of personal wealth individuals can protect under Chapter 7 to analyze the effect of debtor protection on the financing structure and performance of a representative panel of U.S start-ups. The effect of increasing debtor protection depends on the...

A debtor-friendly personal bankruptcy regime reallocates credit by reducing its availability, particularly for low-asset individuals. We show that increasing the amount of asset protection in bankruptcy leads to higher income inequality. The rise in inequality is amplified in industries with...

Firms' innovative activities can be sensitive to public policies that affect the availability of capital for risky projects. In this paper, we investigate the effects of regional and temporal variation in U.S. personal bankruptcy laws on firms' innovative activities. We find bankruptcy laws that...

This paper analyzes how different levels of debtor protection across U.S. states affect small firms' access to credit, as well as the price and non-price terms of their loans. We use a measure of debtor protection that has its maximum value when the borrower's home equity is lower than the state...

Conventional wisdom holds that small banks have comparative advantages vis-à-vis large banks in serving small firms, while recent literature suggests this may not be the case. Using a panel of recent US start-ups, we investigate how small bank presence affects these firms in normal times...