The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act: means-testing or mean spirited?

Adam Ashcraft (), Astrid A. Dick and Donald Morgan

No 279, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Thousands of U.S. households filed for bankruptcy just before the bankruptcy law changed in 2005. That rush-to-file was more pronounced, we find, in states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions and lower credit scores. We take that finding as evidence that the new law effectively reduces exemptions, which in turn should reduce the ?demand? for bankruptcy and the resulting losses to suppliers of consumer credit. We expect the savings to suppliers will be shared with borrowers by way of lower credit card rates, although credit card spreads have not yet fallen. If cheaper credit is the upside of the new law, the downside is reduced bankruptcy ?insurance? against bad luck. The overall impact of the new law on the average household depends on how one weighs those two sides.

Keywords: Bankruptcy; Consumer credit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr279.html (text/html)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr279.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:279

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().