In an important but thus far unnoticed development, federal courts have created a new series of "default principles" for statutory interpretation, authorizing regulatory agencies, when statutes are unclear, (a) to exempt trivial risks from regulation and thus to develop a kind of common law of...

Routine default threatens the foundations of the United States court system. We study the problem of routine default by human defendants, using the Boston Municipal Court's debt collection docket as our laboratory. Arbitraging various non-law literatures, we designed interventions consisting of...

In the presence of uninsurable idiosyncratic risk, the optimal credit contract allows for the possibility of default. In addition, the optimal contract incorporates a precautionary savings motive over and above what agents would otherwise save. When default is sufficiently high, credit markets...