This paper estimates the effect of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on post-filing financial outcomes using a new … dataset linking bankruptcy filings to credit bureau records. Our empirical strategy uses the leniency of randomly …

countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data? Yes, it does, but only if we explicitly model recessions as displaying … bankruptcy risk discouraging households from using credit. This finding contradicts the intuition that access to credit helps …

This paper estimates the extent to which legal fees prevent liquidity-constrained households from declaring bankruptcy …. To do so, it studies how the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates affected consumer bankruptcy filings. We exploit the randomized …-collected data from individual bankruptcy petitions, we document that the rebates caused an increase in the average liabilities and …

Bankruptcy is the legal process by which the debts of firms, individuals, and occasionally governments in financial … distress are resolved. Bankruptcy law always includes three components. First, it provides a collective framework for … how the assets and earnings used to repay are divided among creditors. Third, bankruptcy law specifies punishments …

This paper examines how filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 13 helps financially distressed debtors save their homes …. We develop a model of debtors' decisions to default on their mortgages and file for bankruptcy under Chapter 13 and … evaluate the model using new data on Chapter 13 bankruptcy filers. We also examine the effect of allowing bankruptcy judges to …

market innovations which cause a decrease in the transactions cost of lending and a decline in the cost of bankruptcy can … largely accounting for the rise in consumer bankruptcy. We also argue that the abolition of usury laws and other legal changes …

From 1980 to 2004, the number of personal bankruptcy filings in the United States increased more than five-fold, from … 288,000 to 1.5 million per year. Lenders responded to the high filing rate with a major lobbying campaign for bankruptcy … reform that led to the adoption in 2005 of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), which made …

decision variables, such as financial benefit from filing for bankruptcy, or debt discharged in bankruptcy are endogenous with … the bankruptcy decision or not. For the strategic timing theory such decisions are endogenous, while for the adverse … are exogenous with the bankruptcy decision, consistent with the adverse events theory …