This paper estimates the effect of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on post-filing financial outcomes using a new dataset linking bankruptcy filings to credit bureau records. Our empirical strategy us
Personal bankruptcies in the United States have increased dramatically, rising from 1.4 per thousand working age adults in 1970 to 8.5 in 2002. We use a heterogeneous agent life-cycle model with compe
Consumer bankruptcy provides partial insurance against bad luck, but, by driving up interest rates, makes life-cycle smoothing more difficult. We argue that to assess this trade-off one needs a quanti