Auto lenders were perhaps the biggest winners of the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform. Cars depreciate quickly, so borrowers … to the market value of the car through a "cramdown" in Chapter 13 bankruptcy. The Reform prohibited cramdowns during the … eliminating cramdowns affected only one of the two types of consumer bankruptcy: Chapter 13. They exploit persistent historical …

Increasing personal bankruptcy protection raises consumers' desire to borrow and lenders' cost of extending credit; the … impact on equilibrium borrowing is ambiguous. Using bankruptcy protection changes between 1999 and 2005 across U.S. states …

We build a structural model of Chapter 13 bankruptcy that captures salient features of personal bankruptcy under … Chapter 13. We estimate our model using a novel data set that we construct from bankruptcy court dockets recorded in Delaware … 13 outcomes under the restrictions imposed by the bankruptcy law. We use the estimated model to conduct policy …

Using a comprehensive panel dataset on U.S. households, we study the effects of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention … and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), the most substantive reform of personal bankruptcy in the United States since the … Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. The 2005 legislation introduced a means test based on income to establish eligibility for Chapter …

example, places where bankruptcy resolution is more difficult and/or takes longer) see a greater dependence on "stable" real …

We argue that the 2005 bankruptcy abuse reform (BAR) contributed to the surge in subprime foreclosures that followed … its passage. Before BAR, over-indebted mortgagors could free up income to pay the mortgage by filing bankruptcy and having … effects of BAR using state home equity bankruptcy exemptions; filers in low-exemption states were not very protected before …