An Optimal Personal Bankruptcy Procedure and Proposed Reforms
研究美国个人破产法改革，提出合并第7章和第13章，要求债务人用财富和未来收入偿还债务，优化豁免额以提高效率。
We investigate a new approach to the reform of U.S. personal bankruptcy law in which Chapters 7 and 13 would be combined. The proposed reform obliges debtors in bankruptcy to use part of both their wealth and their future earnings to repay debt and therefore bases the obligation to repay in bankruptcy on debtors' ability to pay from both sources. An important function of personal bankruptcy is to provide partial wealth insurance for risk‐averse debtors by discharging some debt when debtors' ability to repay turns out to be low. However, the current bankruptcy system encourages debtors to file for bankruptcy even when their ability to repay is high. The proposed reform maintains the insurance function of bankruptcy but reduces debtors' incentive to take advantage of the system. Using simulation techniques, we investigate the properties of a bankruptcy reform in which both the wealth exemption and the postbankruptcy earnings exemption are optimized. We show that the proposed reform improves efficiency relative to the current system.