This study examined the impact of declaring consumer bankruptcy on the physical and mental health of adult women and if outcomes differed depending on whether the filer received automatic debt discharge under Chapter 7 compared to a debt repayment plan with Chapter 13. Sample data consisted of women from the NLSY79 cohort who completed the age 40 and 50 health modules as of the most recent wave...

This paper characterizes the labor supply and borrowing of a household facing collateral requirements that limit its debt and compel it to accumulate equity in its durable goods stock. The household's discount rate exceeds the market rate of interest, so it would otherwise finance increased current consumption by borrowing against future wages. Collateral constraints generate a positive comovem...

Reject inference is the problem of inferring the good and bad properties of those customers who have not been accepted for a loan. We present a reject inference method based on the confidence interval of a median survival time to delayed repayment. In this method, survival model is built based on the accepted applicant data and is applied to the rejected applicant. If the lower limit of the 90%...

This paper characterizes the labor supply and borrowing of a household facing collateral requirements that limit its debt and compel it to accumulate equity in its durable goods stock. The household's discount rate exceeds the market rate of interest, so it would otherwise finance increased current consumption by borrowing against future wages. Collateral constraints generate a positive comovem...

This paper attempts to quantify the ill-effects of covariate shocks such as natural disasters on the sustainability of microfinance. The vulnerability of microfinance to covariate shocks is wellknown theoretically and in anecdotes, but very few quantitative evidence exists. For our attempt, we use a unique dataset of about 3,000 micro-borrower households covering over a period of 1994-2006 incl...

This paper uses information contained within the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) to examine the ability of Irish households to sustain their mortgage repayments. We calculate mortgage repayment to income (MRTI) ratios for a representative sample of Irish households and examine the distribution of this ratio across the sample. In particular, we stratify information on marital, work...