U.S. Household Debt and Bankruptcy Exemptions, 1999-2005

22 million person-quarter observations from a 1% sample of U.S. credit files, combined with state-level bankruptcy exemption data from 1999 to 2005. This replication dataset supports the study 'Personal Bankruptcy Protection and Household Debt' by Severino, Brown, and Chakrabarti (Forthcoming, 2026). It integrates individual credit data, branch-level interest rates, and county-level economic controls to analyze policy effects on borrowing and delinquency.

Use Cases

• Replicate difference-in-differences estimates of bankruptcy exemption changes on household debt based on state-level policy variation.
• Analyze border-county nonparametric comparisons of credit outcomes using the county-level interest rate and credit panel data.
• Conduct heterogeneity analyses on low-income homeowners or other subsamples defined in the study.
• Calibrate economic models of household borrowing using the combined panel of debt balances, interest rates, and delinquency.
• Study the relationship between self-employment, startup capital, and credit access using the integrated Census Survey of Business Owners measures.

Strengths

• Integrates four primary data sources, including proprietary datasets from the NY Fed Consumer Credit Panel and RateWatch.
• Covers approximately 22 million person-quarter observations and 4,100 county-year observations.
• Includes replication code in Stata to reproduce all main and appendix results from the associated paper.
• Provides a mock dataset structure to guide replicability where proprietary data cannot be shared.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The individual-level credit and interest rate data are mock datasets, not the original proprietary data.
• Data freshness should be verified; the last update was 2026-06-06 17:44:46.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse, author Felipe Severino.

Collection Method

Manually compiled state exemption laws combined with anonymized credit panel data, branch-level interest rates, and public economic controls.

Time Range

1999 to 2005, with robustness checks extending through 2009.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-06 17:44:46

Geography

50 U.S. states and Washington D.C., with county- and ZIP code-level detail.