The two channels of default on unsecured consumer debt are (i) bankruptcy, which legally grants partial or complete removal of unsecured debt under certain circumstances, and (ii) delinquency, which is informal default via nonpayment. In the United States, both channels are used routinely. This...

A model of mortgage defaults is built into the standard incomplete markets model. Households face income and house-price shocks and purchase houses using long-term mortgages. Interest rates on mortgages are determined in equilibrium according to the risk of default. The model accounts for the...

We study the endogenous determination of corporate debt maturity in a setting with default risk. We assume that firms must access the bond market and they issue debt with a flexible structure (coupon, face value, and maturity). Initially, the firm is in a low growth/illiquid state that requires...

This paper incorporates house price risk and mortgages into a standard incomplete market (SIM) model. The model is calibrated to match U.S. data and accounts for non-targeted features of the data such as the distribution of down payments, the life-cycle profile of home ownership, and the...

This paper incorporates house price risk and mortgages into a standard incomplete market (SIM) model. The model is calibrated to match U.S. data and accounts for non-targeted features of the data such as the distribution of down payments, the life-cycle profile of home ownership, and the...

Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous...