Using quarterly data on personal consumer bankruptcy for 1989:Q4 through 1998:Q1, this study examines the impact that the introduction of casino gambling has on per capita personal bankruptcy filings. Eight jurisdictions that have recently adopted gambling are compared with a set of matching control jurisdictions, communities without casinos that are economically and demographically similar to ...

By compiling a novel dataset from bankruptcy court dockets recorded in Delaware between 2001 and 2002, we build and estimate a structural model of Chapter 13 bankruptcy. This allows us to quantify how key debtor characteristics, including whether they are experiencing bankruptcy for the …rst time, their past due secured debt at the time of …ling, and income in excess of that required for basic ...

This paper examines the implicit health insurance that households receive from the ability to declare bankruptcy. Exploiting multiple sources of variation in asset exemption law, I show that uninsured households with a greater financial cost of bankruptcy make higher out-of-pocket medical payments, conditional on the amount of care received. In turn, I find that households with greater wealth a...

SHOULD THERE BE a sovereign bankruptcy procedure for countries in financial distress? This paper explores the use of U.S. bankruptcy law as a model for a sovereign bankruptcy procedure and asks whether adoption of such a procedure would lead to a more orderly process of sovereign debt restructuring. It assumes that a quick and orderly debt restructuring process is more efficient than a prolonge...

The Czech Republic is a country whose economy has undergone a transformation since 1989. Since joining the EU it has been striving to reduce the differences in its economic standard and the quality of its institutional environment in comparison with developed countries. According to an assessment carried out by the World Bank, the Czech Republic was long classed as a country whose institutional...

Prior to the enactment of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) of 2005, United States bankruptcy law provided a number of different mechanisms designed to both facilitate credit markets and provide some measure of consumption insurance. The interplay between chapter 7 and chapter 13 discharge procedures in particular influenced debtor behavior such that debtors s...

BACKGROUND Massachusetts' recent health reform has decreased the number of uninsured, but no study has examined medical bankruptcy rates before and after the reform was implemented. METHODS In 2009, we surveyed 199 Massachusetts bankruptcy filers regarding medical antecedents of their financial collapse using the same questions as in a 2007 survey of 2314 debtors nationwide, including 44 in M...

We introduce a new class of bankruptcy problems in which the value of the estate is endogenous and depends on agents’ investment decisions. There are two investment alternatives: investing in a company (risky asset) and depositing money into a savings account (risk-free asset). Bankruptcy is possible only for the risky asset. We define a game between agents each of which aims to maximize his ex...

The Enron Corporation went from a $65 billion dollar market capitalization to bankruptcy in just 16 months. Using statistical techniques for extracting the implied probability distributions built into option prices, I examine the market’s expectation of Enron’s risk of collapse. I find that the options market remained far too optimistic about the stock until just weeks before their bankruptcy f...