Debt Relief and Debtor Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Consumer Bankruptcy Protection

We are extremely grateful to Raj Chetty, Roland Fryer, Edward Glaeser, and Lawrence Katz at Harvard, and Gerald Ray and David Foster at the Social Security Administration for their help and support. We also thank Tal Gross, Matthew Notowidigdo, and Jialan Wang for providing the bankruptcy data used in this analysis, and Joseph Altonji, Sam Asher, Adrien Auclert, David Autor, Lanier Benkard, David Deming, Joseph Doyle, John Friedman, Peter Ganong, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Joshua Goodman, Adam Guren, Guido Imbens, David Laibson, Robert Lawless, Adam Levitin, Brigitte Madrian, Neale Mahoney, Sendhil Mullainathan, Antoinette Schoar, Steven Shavell, Jörg Spenkuch, Jeremy Tobacman, Danny Yagan, Crystal Yang, and numerous seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. Elijah De la Campa, Kwabena Donkor, Rebecca Sachs, and Jessica Wagner provided outstanding research assistance. Financial support from the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy, the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and the Terence M. Considine Fellowship through the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School 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 authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.