We empirically establish that unemployed individuals maintain significant access to credit
and that upon a layoff, the unconstrained borrow while the constrained default and delever …

Sovereign debt crises involve debt restructurings characterized by a mix of face value
haircuts and maturity extensions. The prevalence of maturity extensions has been hard to …

The turmoil that started with increased defaults in the subprime mortgage market has
generated instability in the financial system around the world. To better understand the root …

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 …

We develop a model to predict consumer default based on deep learning. We show that the
model consistently outperforms standard credit scoring models, even though it uses the …

We incorporate a search-theoretic model of imperfect competition into a standard model of
asymmetric information with unrestricted contracts. We characterize the unique equilibrium …

Financial innovations are a common explanation for the rise in credit card debt and
bankruptcies. To evaluate this story, we develop a simple model that incorporates two key …

Important changes have occurred in unsecured credit markets over the past three decades.
Most prominently, there have been large increases in aggregate consumer debt, the …

How does consumer credit access impact job flows, earnings, and entrepreneurship? To
answer this question, we build a new administrative dataset which links individual …

Regulators express growing concern over predatory loans, which we take to mean loans
that borrowers should decline. Using a model of consumer credit in which such lending is …