Personal Bankruptcy and Credit Supply and Demand
利用1983年消费者金融调查数据，发现慷慨的州级破产豁免增加了高资产家庭的信贷持有，却减少了低资产家庭的信贷可得性和金额，并将信贷重新分配给高资产借款人。
This paper examines how personal bankruptcy and bankruptcy exemptions affect the supply and demand for credit. While generous state-level bankruptcy exemptions are probably viewed by most policy-makers as benefiting less-well-off borrowers, our results using data from the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finances suggest that they increase the amount of credit held by high-asset households and reduce the availability and amount of credit to low-asset households, conditioning on observable characteristics. Thus, bankruptcy exemptions redistribute credit toward borrowers with high assets. Interest rates on automobile loans for low-asset households also appear to be higher in high exemption states.