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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 ...
Working Paper
Credit When You Need It
We estimate the causal effect of emergency credit on households’ finances after a negative shock. To do so, we link application data from the U.S. Federal Disaster Loan program, which provides loans to households that have uninsured damages from a federally-declared natural disaster, to a panel of credit records before and after the shock. We exploit a discontinuity in the loan approval rules that led applicants with debt-to-income ratios below 40% to be differentially likely to be approved. Using an instrumented difference-in-differences research design, we find that credit provision at ...