Personal Bankruptcy and the Accumulation of Shadow Debt

We thank conference and seminar participants at the AEA, AFA, Boston Federal Reserve, BYU, CFPB, Dartmouth, the FDIC Consumer Symposium, MIT, Michigan State University, PUC Chile, the University of Rochester, and WEAI; our discussants Pat Akey, Arpit Gupta, Ryan Lewis, Feng Liu, Neale Mahoney, and Michelle White; and Carter Davis, Anthony DeFusco, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Kyle Herkenhoff, Sasha Indarte, Ben Keys, Raymond Kluender, Sam Kruger, Brigitte Madrian, Gregor Matvos, Carlos Parra, Antoinette Schoar, Amit Seru, Felipe Severino, Adrien Verdelhan, and Jialan Wang for helpful comments. We appreciate the research assistance of Tammy Lee, Joseph Leung, and Richard Maxwell. We benefited tremendously from helpful conversations with David Sime, Clerk of the Utah Bankruptcy Court, and thank the Utah, Minnesota, Florida North and Florida South Bankruptcy Courts for data access. Palmer acknowledges funding from NSF CAREER Grant 1944138. This project received exempt status from MIT's IRB. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.