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Working Paper
Credit, bankruptcy, and aggregate fluctuations
We ask two questions related to how access to credit affects the nature of business cycles. First, does the standard theory of unsecured credit account for the high volatility and procyclicality of credit and the high volatility and countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data? Yes, it does, but only if we explicitly model recessions as displaying countercyclical earnings risk (i.e., rather than having all households fare slightly worse than normal during recessions, we ensure that more households than normal fare very poorly). Second, does access to credit smooth aggregate ...
Working Paper
Debt Collection Agencies and the Supply of Consumer Credit
This paper finds that stricter laws regulating third-party debt collection reduce the number of third-party debt collectors, lower the recovery rates on delinquent credit card loans, and lead to a modest decrease in the openings of new revolving lines of credit. Further, stricter third-party debt collection laws are associated with fewer consumer lawsuits against third-party debt collectors but not with a reduction in the overall number of consumer complaints. Overall, stricter third-party debt collection laws appear to restrict access to new revolving credit but have an ambiguous effect on ...
Working Paper
Financial benefits, travel costs, and bankruptcy
We are the first to show that the cost of personal bankruptcy filers traveling to their bankruptcy trustees affects bankruptcy choices. We use detailed balance sheet, income statement, and location data from 400,000 Canadian bankruptcies. To control for endogenous trustee selection, we use the location of local government offices as an instrument for the location of bankruptcy trustees (while filers interact with trustees, and trustees interact with local government, filers do not interact with the local government). We find that increased travel costs reduce the number of filings. ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Minimum Wages on Consumer Bankruptcy
We use cross-state differences in minimum wage (MW) levels and county-level consumer bankruptcy rates from 1991-2017 to estimate the effect of changes in minimum wages on consumer bankruptcy by exploiting policy discontinuities at state borders. We find that Chapter 7 bankruptcy rates are significantly lower in counties belonging to states with higher MW compared to neighboring counties in the lower MW state: a 10 percent increase in MW decreases the bankruptcy rate by around 4 percent. Before the 2005 bankruptcy reform, this effect was almost twice as large as for the entire sample. ...
Working Paper
Spatial Commitment Devices and Addictive Goods: Evidence from the Removal of Slot Machines from Bars
Commitment device theory suggests that temptations to consume addictive goods could be reduced by the regulatory removal of geographically close environmental cues. We provide new evidence on this hypothesis using a quasi-natural experiment, in which gambling regulators removed slot machines from some, but not all, neighborhood bars. We find that the removal of slot machines reduced personal bankruptcies of close neighbors (within 100 meters) but not neighbors slightly farther away. This is consistent with the removal of neighborhood slots serving as an effective spatial commitment device, ...
Working Paper
Does the Relative Income of Peers Cause Financial Distress? Evidence from Lottery Winners and Neighboring Bankruptcies
SUPERSEDED BY WP 18-22 We examine whether relative income differences among peers can generate financial distress. Using lottery winnings as plausibly exogenous variations in the relative income of peers, we find that the dollar magnitude of a lottery win of one neighbor increases subsequent borrowing and bankruptcies among other neighbors. We also examine which factors may mitigate lenders? bankruptcy risk in these neighborhoods. We show that bankruptcy filers can obtain secured but not unsecured debt, and lenders provide secured credit to low-risk but not high-risk debtors. In addition, we ...
Working Paper
Who is screened out of social insurance programs by entry barriers? Evidence from consumer bankruptcies
Entry barriers into social insurance programs will be effective screening devices if they cause only those individuals receiving higher benefits from a program to participate in that program. We find evidence for this by using plausibly exogenous variations in travel-related entry costs into the Canadian consumer bankruptcy system. Using detailed balance sheet and travel data, we find that higher travel-related entry costs reduce bankruptcies from individuals with lower financial benefits of bankruptcy (unsecured debt discharged, minus secured assets forgone). When compared across filers, ...
Working Paper
Bankruptcy Lawyers and Credit Recovery
The author studies how bankruptcy law firm advertisements affect credit recovery of households in financial distress. Exploiting the border discontinuity strategy associated with the geographic unit in which local TV advertisements are sold, the author empirically uncovers bankruptcy filings and credit recovery related to exogenous variations in bankruptcy law firm advertisements. The author first documents a significant advertising effect on filing rates and shows that advertising-induced filers are similar to existing filers. The author then finds a positive effect of advertisements on ...
Report
Auto credit and the 2005 bankruptcy reform: the impact of eliminating cramdowns
Auto lenders were perhaps the biggest winners of the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform. Cars depreciate quickly, so borrowers often owe more than their car is worth. Prior to the Reform, these borrowers could reduce the principal on their auto loan to the market value of the car through a ?cramdown? in Chapter 13 bankruptcy. The Reform prohibited cramdowns during the first two and a half years of an auto loan. This paper is the first to estimate the causal effect of this anticramdown provision on the price and quantity of auto credit. The authors use a novel empirical strategy that relies on the fact ...
Working Paper
A tale of two commitments: equilibrium default and temptation
I construct the life-cycle model with equilibrium default and preferences featuring temptation and self-control. The model provides quantitatively similar answers to positive questions such as the causes of the observed rise in debt and bankruptcies and macroeconomic implications of the 2005 bankruptcy reform, as the standard model without temptation. However, the temptation model provides contrasting welfare implications, because of overborrowing when the borrowing constraint is relaxed. Specifically, the 2005 bankruptcy reform has an overall negative welfare effect, according to the ...