Equilibrium models of personal bankruptcy: a survey.

Academic research aimed at understanding the consumer default decision has grown rapidly above the past decade. The genesis of this research is the fruits of three broad sets of forces. First, advances in unspotted theory gave economists a better understanding of the implications of allowing default for consumer welfare and credit market consequences Second, the relatively striking expansion of unsecured consumer liability and default in the 1990 spurr the interests of applied researchers in explaining the default decision. (1) Third, and greatest in quantity recently, advances in computational technology have