We estimate the extent to which legal and administrative fees prevent liquidity-constrained
households from declaring bankruptcy. To do so, we study how the 2001 and 2008 tax …

A large body of literature has examined factors leading to filing for personal bankruptcy, but
little is known about household borrowing after bankruptcy. This paper augments the …

The key feature of the modern US personal bankruptcy law is to provide debtors a financial
fresh start through debt discharge. It has long been believed that the primary goal of the …

This article studies the optimal determination of bankruptcy exemptions for risk averse
borrowers who use unsecured contracts but have the possibility of defaulting. In a large …

Protections for defaulting debtors are a widely used form of consumption insurance. This
paper evaluates the costs and benefits of this insurance, both inside and outside of …

We build a structural model that captures salient features of personal bankruptcy under
Chapter 13. We estimate our model using a novel data set that we construct from …

Personal bankruptcy filings in the United States increased, per capita, nearly 350 percent
between 1980 and 2005. This paper first addresses the changes in economic and …

Previous work linking liquidity constraints to excessive consumption sensitivity have used
household level information on wealth and assets to split the sample into households that …

Change is in the air in the bankruptcy system. An omnibus bankruptcy bill has substantially
amended titles 11 and 28 of the United States Code,'and the professionals involved with …

This paper provides an update to Skinner's (1987) predicted consumption measure for
households in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1980 to 2003. More than 80% of …