Since the early twentieth century, observers have attributed the wide variation in state bankruptcy rates to variation in state legal rules such as garnishment and bankruptcy exemptions. Recent econometric analyses, however, conclude that legal rules do not matter. We explore the impact of legal...

When students are taught how to do original research in courses outside economics, they are taught to begin with the collection of data. This is not the approach followed by economists, who typically begin an answer to a research question by developing a model. The model then guides the search...