This paper argues that the debt forgiveness provided by the U.S. consumer bankruptcy system helped stabilize employment levels during the Great Recession. We document that over this period, states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions had significantly smaller declines in non-tradable...

This paper argues that the debt forgiveness provided by the U.S. consumer bankruptcy system helped stabilize employment levels during the Great Recession. We document that over this period, states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions had significantly smaller declines in non-tradable...

We introduce a model in which agents observe signals about the state of the world, and some signals are open to interpretation. Our decision makers first interpret each signal based on their current belief and then form a posterior on the sequence of interpreted signals. This ‘double...