This article draws upon data from a large empirical study of business bankruptcy cases to cast serious doubt upon two of the fundamental premises required to support claims that bankruptcy law should be replaced by default procedures established by contract. A number of proposals have been made...

In 2001, 1.458 million American families filed for bankruptcy. To investigate medical contributors to bankruptcy we surveyed 1771 personal bankruptcy filers in five Federal courts, and subsequently completed in-depth interviews with 931 of them. About half of debtors cited medical causes,...

The Business Bankruptcy Project is a five-year empirical study of about 3,200 business cases originally filed in Chapter 7, Chapter 11 and Chapter 13 in 23 judicial districts during 1994. This first report focuses on financial and demographic data, creating a statistical profile of the...

Just three years ago, Congress enacted controversial amendments to the Bankruptcy Code. The proponents claimed that the changes would drive the quot;can payquot; debtors (of which there were supposedly many) from the bankruptcy courts with tough new income-based eligibility requirements. And...

Although data from the Administrative Office (AO) of the U.S. Courts suggest that only a small fraction of the 1.6 million bankruptcies filed each year are business failures, new research from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project reveals that roughly 17 percent of bankruptcy filings involve the...

Illness and injury have a significant financial impact on families, but recent news media reporting and lawmaker responses have framed these issues in terms of hospital mistreatment of the uninsured. In this article, we argue that the hospital misbehavior model imposes artificial parameters on a...