) rising bankruptcy rates and discharge in bankruptcy, (4) rising dispersion in interest rates across households, and (5) the …

The 1990's witnessed a historically unprecedented number of personal bankruptcy filings. In response, congressional … debate over bankruptcy law has recently led to several proposals aimed at making it more difficult to exempt wealth in … bankruptcy. In this paper, I evaluate uniform exemption policy primarily within the context of the recent congressional proposal …

In U.S. data, income interruptions, the receipt of public insurance, and the incidence of personal bankruptcy are all … closely related. The central contribution of this paper is to evaluate both bankruptcy protection and public insurance in a … delivers two striking conclusions. First, we find that U.S. personal bankruptcy law is an important barrier to allowing the …