The current majority rule for handling the discharge of tax debt related to a tardily filed tax return is severely distorted and antithetical to sound bankruptcy and taxation policy. For years, it was established law that bankruptcy could discharge stale tax debts. Indeed, the Bankruptcy Code...

We examine the personal bankruptcy decisions of lower-income homeowners before and after the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA). Econometric studies suggest that personal bankruptcy is explained by financial gain rather than adverse events, but data constraints have...

Because theory suggests that businesses will wait too long to file voluntarily, current scholarship asks whether bankruptcy should offer larger rewards to managers and shareholders to induce them to file earlier. Although creditors could force firms into bankruptcy sooner by filing involuntary...

Across the criminal and civil justice systems, research regarding procedural justice — feeling that one has a voice, is respected, and is before a neutral and even-handed adjudicator — shows that people's positive perceptions of legal processes are fundamental to the legal system's...

Personal bankruptcies have continued to rise even after passage of a comprehensive reform designed to curb strategic use of bankruptcy. We formalize a distinction between strategic filing and adverse events filing by testing whether consumers manipulate their debt and filing decision or not....

In the U.S., individuals who file for bankruptcy can protect a certain amount of property from creditor liquidation during the debt settlement process. Our analysis exploits changes in these laws to determine the impact on home mortgage lending. We find that the additional debtor protection...

In the U.S., individual parties who file for bankruptcy can exempt a certain dollar amount of property from creditor liquidation during the debt settlement process. We examine the effect of changes to these protection laws on bank lending to small businesses. Our results indicate that additional...

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...

African American bankruptcy filers are more likely to select Chapter 13 than other debtors, who opt instead for Chapter 7, which has higher success rates and lower attorney fees. Prior scholarship blames racial discrimination by bankruptcy attorneys. We present an alternative explanation:...