We consider the value of social capital that derives from membership in a church. American states with larger churchgoing populations had lower business bankruptcy rates from 1921 to 1932, and states in which the churchgoing population was concentrated in few churches had business bankruptcy...

For children in foster care who cannot be reunified with their families of origin, there is no question that adoption is preferable to "aging out". Moreover, every dollar spent on adoption for a child from foster care yields three dollars in benefits. Yet, 27,854 youth aged out of foster care in...

For children in foster care who cannot be reunified with their families of origin, there is no question that adoption is preferable to “aging outâ€. Moreover, every dollar spent on adoption for a child from foster care yields three dollars in benefits. Yet, 27,854 youth aged out of...

Credit relationships are sticky. Stickiness makes relationships beneficial for borrowers in distress, but potentially problematic for them when lenders face distress. To examine stickiness in a time of distress, we exploit a natural experiment during the Depression that generated differences in...

We use the 2007 and 2010 Surveys of Consumer Finances (SCF) and a difference-in-differences approach to investigate whether the Great Recession differentially affected the attitudes of men and women towards taking on debt, as well as whether it affected the relative financial position of women....

This paper exploits newly-collected, highly-detailed data on sources of credit drawn from documents filed by a sample of petitioners for bankruptcy in Mississippi in the 1930s. The bankruptcy documents reveal that long-distance credit networks were extensive during this period. Credit networks...

Two decades of research on differences in labor market outcomes by sexual orientation has concluded that lesbian workers earn more than heterosexual women. This research, however, is largely based upon data that do not ask respondents about their own sexual orientation. We are the first to use...

The onset of the Great Depression did not spark a surge in personal bankruptcy. For debtors in default, state garnishment law played a significant role in the decision to file for bankruptcy. Only states that made it easy to garnish a debtor's wages experienced significant increases in...