The U.S. Department of the Treasury has submitted the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009 to Congress for the purpose of overhauling consumer financial regulation. This study has examined the likely effect of the Act on the availability of credit to American consumers. To do so we...

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the United States officially went into a recession in December of 2007. This year's Annual Consumer Bankruptcy Demographics Report will be the first research to capture information on American debtors filing bankruptcy during the first 12...

This article measures the impact of state laws on defaulting borrowers. Prior literature has assessed the impact of laws that limit the enforcement of judgments on bankruptcy filings. However, (1) the majority of defaulting consumers do not file for bankruptcy, and (2) most debt collection takes...

The consumer bankruptcy process functions on economies of scale. In order to maintain a relatively low cost of access to the bankruptcy forum, attorneys, judges, private trustees, and other bankruptcy professionals typically handle massive caseloads in a fairly routine manner. This structure has...

The paper provides a simple theoretical framework to assess the macroeconomic implications of debt-fuelled consumption. In particular, the analysis is conducted through an extended super-multiplier model with endogenous credit money, which highlights the role of the autonomous components of...

In Poland, over the past four years we have been witnessing the liberalisation of the laws on consumer bankruptcy which results in an increased number of declared bankruptcies and there are many indications that both phenomena will proceed. This paper deals with some major manifestations of such...

We estimate a two-stage Heckman selection model of credit card adoption and use with a unique dataset that combines administrative data from the Equifax credit bureau and self-reported data from the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, a representative survey of US consumers. Even though the...

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve has recently promulgated an “ability to pay” rule under the CARD Act that prevents many stay-at-home mothers and homemakers from opening sole-account credit cards. This rule requires credit card issuers to consider only a person's independent...

The subprime mortgage crisis that helped to bring on the Great Recession resulted in the decimation of housing-related wealth among economically disenfranchised groups and communities. These losses were in significant part the direct result of the rampant racialized and geographic mortgage...