In 2009, the Seventh Circuit ruled in U.S. v. Apex Oil that certain types of injunctions requiring firms to clean up previously released toxic chemicals were not dischargeable in bankruptcy. This was widely perceived to represent a split with Sixth Circuit precedent, although Supreme Court cert...

Over six million households experienced foreclosure during the financial crisis. Where did they move, how did they fare, and why? First, we create a new longitudinal dataset between 2006 and 2011 from households' date of foreclosure to their relocation. Despite significant heterogeneity in...

Limited liability has long been recognized to incentivize owners of firms near bankruptcy to take suboptimal care to prevent harm to third parties. I use violations of the Clean Water Act to study these incentives. I show that as firms approach bankruptcy (as measured by their credit ratings)...

Scholars frequently assert that financial legislation in the U.S. is primarily driven by financial crises. This ‘crisis legislation hypothesis’ is often cited as an explanation for various supposed shortcomings of US financial legislation, including that it is ill-conceived and inadequate to...

How do firms' efforts to prevent harm to third parties change as they approach, enter, and then exit bankruptcy? To help answer this, I investigate a panel of roughly 350 US firms, all of which declare bankruptcy and are regulated under the Clean Water Act (CWA) for pollutants they release into...