Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia> Conference on the Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System, New York, NY, June 16, 2010>

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia> Conference on the Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System, New York, NY, June 16, 2010>

Because of the recent surge in U.S. personal defaults, Congress is currently debating bankruptcy reform legislation requiring a means test for Chapter 7 filers. This paper explores the effects of such a reform in a model where, in contrast to previous work, bankruptcy options and production are...

Banks and credit card companies lobbied Congress for several years to amend the Bankruptcy Code because of an increasing number of bankruptcy filings1 and evidence that debtors were abusing the existing code. On April 20, 2005, President Bush signed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer...

On September 8, 2003, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia hosted a workshop on consumer bankruptcy and its effect on unsecured lenders. Professor Melissa Jacoby of Temple University’s School of Law led the workshop. A leading bankruptcy scholar, Jacoby...

By compiling a novel data set from bankruptcy court dockets recorded in Delaware between 2001 and 2002, the authors build and estimate a structural model of Chapter 13 bankruptcy. This allows them to quantify how key debtor characteristics, including whether they are experiencing bankruptcy for...

We develop and test a model of mortgage underwriting, with particular reference to the role of credit bureau scores. In our model scores are used in a standardized fashion, which reflects the prevalence of automated underwriting in industry practice. We show that our model has implications for...

The authors explore the economic rationale for equitable subordination, a legal doctrine that permits a firm's claimants to seek to subordinate an informed investor's financial claim in bankruptcy court. Fear of equitable subordination is often cited as a reason that banks in the U.S. are wary...

The key feature of the modern U.S. personal bankruptcy law is to provide debtors a financial fresh start through debt discharge. The primary justification for the discharge policy is to preserve human capital by maintaining incentives for work. In this paper, we test this fresh start argument by...