In this paper, we investigate how personal bankruptcy law affects small firms' access to credit. When a firm is unincorporated, its debts are personal liabilities of the firm's owner, so that lending to the firm is legally equivalent to lending to its owner. If the firm fails, the owner has an...

We investigate a proposed reform of U.S. personal bankruptcy law which combines Chapters 7 and 13. The proposed reform obliges debtors in bankruptcy to use part of both their wealth and their future earnings to repay debt and therefore bases the obligation to repay in bankruptcy on debtors'...

Both Britain and France have adopted new bankruptcy/ insolvency laws since 1985 and a new bankruptcy law has also been proposed in Germany. Bankruptcy laws in the three European countries have traditionally been oriented toward liquidation, but the new laws move in the direction of allowing...

A much higher fraction of U.S. households would benefit financially from bankruptcy than actually file. While the current bankruptcy filing rate is about one percent of households each year, I calculate that at least 15% of households would benefit financially from filing and the actual figure...

This paper surveys research on the economics of corporate and personal bankruptcy law. Since the literatures on the two types of bankruptcy have developed in isolation of each other, a goal of the survey is to draw out parallels between them. Both theoretical and empirical research are discussed

In this paper, we investigate how personal bankruptcy law affects small firms' access to credit. When a firm is unincorporated, its debts are personal liabilities of the firm's owner, so that lending to the firm is legally equivalent to lending to its owner. If the firm fails, the owner has an...

This paper examines how personal bankruptcy and bankruptcy exemptions affect the supply and demand for credit. While generous state-level bankruptcy exemptions are probably viewed by most policy makers as benefiting less-well-off borrowers, our results using data from the 1983 Survey of Consumer...

This paper investigates the relationship between bankruptcy exemptions and the availability of credit for mortgage and home improvement loans. We develop a combined model of debtors' decisions to file for bankruptcy and to default on their mortgages and show that the theory predicts positive...