Essays on Consumer Default

Legislation dealing with consumer default has consistently struggled with an important trade-off: more debt forgiveness directly benefits households but indirectly makes credit more expensive. This dissertation assesses this trade-off in two ways and provides a tool for future research into this and other topics. Specifically, the first chapter analyzes how business cycles affect the positive and normative consequences of eliminating or restricting default, including the default restrictions put in place by the recent Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA). The second chapter examines the implications of eliminating bankruptcy protection while still allowing households access to informal default. Lastly, the third chapter provides a novel tool for computing equilibrium in dynamic heterogeneous-agent economies, such as the economy in the first chapter. There are four main findings. First, accounting for business cycles substantially reduces the welfare benefit of eliminating default. With or without business cycles, eliminating default greatly expands credit availability; however, when a protracted recession is possible, households use less credit unless they have a default option. Second, while business cycles reduce the welfare gain of eliminating default, this is not necessarily true for restricting default: BAPCPA significantly improves welfare whether or not aggregate risk is taken into account