Credit Slips highlights a very cool new paper, Bankruptcy Spillovers: Distance, Public Disclosure, and Opaque Information.  In the paper, Barry Scholnick examines bankruptcy filings in Canada at a micro level.  Looking at the postal code of every filer – which code is a much more precise geographic identifier than our zip codes – Scholnick concludes:

“The punch line of my study is that there is indeed a significant impact from the past bankruptcies of neighbors (as defined by the very small Canadian Post Codes) to the probability that an individual in the neighborhood will file . . . I propose, and provide evidence for, the hypothesis that if a defaulter lives in a neighborhood with a large number of previous bankruptcies among the neighbors, then [...]

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