We use the 2012 South Carolina Department of Revenue data breach as a natural experiment to study how data breaches and news coverage about them affect consumers? interactions with the credit market and their use of credit. We find that some consumers directly exposed to the breach protected...

We study how forcing financially distressed consumer debtors to repay a larger fraction of debt can lead them to misreport data fraudulently. Using a plausibly exogenous policy change that required debtors to increase repayment to creditors, we document that debtors manipulated data to avoid...

We document that increasing penalties for default reduces strategic default in financial crises by exploiting the 2009 changes to Canadian consumer insolvency regulations. Our novelty is that the incentives from increasing penalties for default operate in the opposite direction from incentives...

We study the financial effects of health insurance for young adults using the Affordable Care Act’s dependent coverage mandate as a source of exogenous variation. Using nationally repre-sentative, anonymized credit report and publicly available survey data on medical expenditures, we...