We are the first to examine whether exogenous shocks cause personal bankruptcy through the balance sheet channel and/or the income statement channel. For identification, we examine the effect of exogenous, politically motivated government payments on 200,000 Canadian bankruptcy filings. We find...

We are the first to show that the cost of personal bankruptcy filers traveling to their bankruptcy trustees affects bankruptcy choices. We use detailed balance sheet, income statement, and location data from 400,000 Canadian bankruptcies. To control for endogenous trustee selection, we use the...

A bursting bubble in a housing market can have a severe negative impact on consumption and GDP. Hence, it is of interest to identify a presence of the bubble in a timely fashion. Existing tests often rely on the relationship between house prices and their corresponding fundamentals, e.g. rents....

"We investigate whether recently high and consequently rapidly decreasing U.S. house prices have been justiØed by fundamental factors such as personal income, population, house rent, stock market wealth, building costs, and mortgage rate. We Ørst conduct the standard unit root and...

This paper examines how instances of identity theft that are sufficiently severe to induce consumers to place an extended fraud alert in their credit reports affect their risk scores, delinquencies, and other credit bureau variables on impact and thereafter. We show that for many consumers these...

Fraud alerts — initial fraud alerts, extended fraud alerts, and credit freezes — help protect consumers from the consequences of identity theft. At the same time, they may impose costs on lenders, credit bureaus, and, in some instances, consumers. We analyze a unique data set of anonymized...

We investigate whether recently high U.S. house prices are justified by fundamental factors. The standard unit root and cointegration tests with aggregate data indicate that house rent is the only fundamental which has the same order of integration as the price, but these two variables are not...

We employ recently developed cross-sectionally robust panel data tests for unit roots and cointegration to find whether house prices reflect house-related earnings. We use U.S. data for Metropolitan Statistical Areas, with house price measured by the weighted-repeated-sales index, and cash flows...

We investigate whether recently high and consequently rapidly decreasing U.S. house prices have been justified by fundamental factors such as personal income, population, house rent, stock market wealth, building costs, and mortgage rate. We first conduct the standard unit root and cointegration...