Bankruptcy abuse prevention has been criticized for increasing foreclosure rates, imposing negative impacts on housing markets, and aggravating the financial crisis. By contrast, this paper documents that bankruptcy abuse prevention reduces household debt overhang, a phenomenon harmful to home values and housing markets. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we find that households in recourse states increased their home improvement and maintenance expenditures after the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, a period during which the households paid considerable attention to the downside risk of the housing market, and that the effects vary by home equity level. The results remain unchanged with alternative specifications and cannot be explained by credit changes, judicial and nonjudicial foreclosures, homestead exemption, house sales, or heterogeneous expectations. Last but not least, we use entropy balancing to eliminate the differences between the treatment and control groups and get similar results. 预防破产滥用的政策被认为推高止赎率、对住房市场造成负面影响以及加剧金融危机而饱受批评。与之相反，本文证明破产滥用预防能够缓解家庭债务积压（debt overhang）—— 而债务积压恰恰是一种损害房屋价值与住房市场的现象。采用双重差分（DID）分析，我们发现：在《破产滥用预防与消费者保护法案》（BAPCPA）实施后，**追索权州（recourse states）**的家庭增加了住房改善与维护支出；该时期家庭对住房市场的下行风险高度关注，且上述效应因房屋净值水平的不同而存在异质性。在多种替代设定下结果依然稳健，且不能被信贷变化、司法与非司法止赎、宅基地豁免、房屋销售或异质性预期所解释。最后，我们使用熵平衡（entropy balancing）方法消除处理组与控制组之间的差异，同样得到了一致的结果。

Shill bidding, the use of non-genuine bids to inflate prices, undermines auction market integrity. Exploiting China’s online judicial housing auctions as a laboratory, we identify 2% of participants as suspected shill bidders, affecting 8% of auctions. They raise price premium by 14.3%, causing an annual deadweight loss of ¥570 million for homebuyers. Mechanism analysis reveals they create bidding momentum and intensify competition. We establish causality using a difference-in-differences analysis leveraging a 2017 regulatory intervention and an instrumental variable approach using dishonest judgment debtors. These findings offer actionable insights for policymakers and auction platforms to combat fraud in online high-stake auctions.

Using loan-level data, we analyze the quality of subprime mortgage loans by adjusting their performance for differences in borrower characteristics, loan characteristics, and house price appreciation since origination. We find that the quality of loans deteriorated for six consecutive years before the crisis and that securitizers were, to some extent, aware of it. We provide evidence that the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage market follows a classic lending boom-bust scenario, in which unsustainable growth leads to the collapse of the market. Problems could have been detected long before the crisis, but they were masked by high house price appreciation between 2003 and 2005.