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Full-Text Articles in Law
Leverage, Default, And Mortality: Evidence From Cancer Diagnoses, Arpit Gupta, Edward R. Morrison, Catherine Fedorenko, Scott Ramsey
Leverage, Default, And Mortality: Evidence From Cancer Diagnoses, Arpit Gupta, Edward R. Morrison, Catherine Fedorenko, Scott Ramsey
Faculty Scholarship
This paper tests whether housing wealth mitigates the effects of health shocks on financial stress and mortality. We link cancer records to mortgage, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and credit report data. We find that cancer diagnoses are financially destabilizing even for households with health insurance, but the effect is driven by households without home equity. Households with equity extract it (by refinancing a mortgage or taking out a second). They are also more likely to accept recommended therapies and have higher post-diagnosis survival rates. Our findings show that housing wealth plays an important role in understanding how individuals buffer idiosyncratic shocks.
Health And Financial Fragility: Evidence From Car Crashes And Consumer Bankruptcy, Edward R. Morrison, Arpit Gupta, Lenora M. Olson, Lawrence Cook, Heather Keenan
Health And Financial Fragility: Evidence From Car Crashes And Consumer Bankruptcy, Edward R. Morrison, Arpit Gupta, Lenora M. Olson, Lawrence Cook, Heather Keenan
Faculty Scholarship
This paper assesses the importance of adverse health shocks as triggers of bankruptcy filings. We view car crashes as a proxy for health shocks and draw on a large sample of police crash reports linked to hospital admission records and bankruptcy case files. We report two findings: (i) there is a strong positive correlation between an individual's pre-shock financial condition and his or her likelihood of suffering a health shock, an example of behavioral consistency; and (ii) after accounting for this simultaneity, we are unable to identify a causal effect of health shocks on bankruptcy filing rates. These findings emphasize …