Targeted Debt Relief and the Origins of Financial Distress: Experimental Evidence from Distressed Credit Card Borrowers

We are extremely grateful to Ann Woods and Robert Kaplan at Money Management International, David Jones at the Association of Independent Consumer Credit Counseling Agencies, Ed Falco at Auriemma Consulting Group, Jennifer Werkley at TransUnion, and Gerald Ray and David Foster at the Social Security Administration for their help and support. We thank Tal Gross, Matthew Notowidigdo, and Jialan Wang for providing the bankruptcy data used in this analysis. We also thank Leah Platt Boustan, Hank Farber, James Feigenbaum, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Tal Gross, Larry Katz, Ben Keys, Patrick Kline, Ilyana Kuziemko, Alex Mas, Jesse Shapiro, Andrei Shleifer, Crystal Yang, Jonathan Zinman, Eric Zwick, and numerous seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. Kevin DeLuca, Daniel Herbst, Disa Hynsjo, Samsun Knight, Kevin Tang, Daniel Van Deusen, Amy Wickett, and Yining Zhu provided excellent research assistance. Financial support from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is gratefully acknowledged. Correspondence can be addressed to the authors by e-mail: wdobbie@princeton.edu [Dobbie] or jae.song@ssa.gov [Song]. Any opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not those of the Social Security Administration. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.