Consumer Bankruptcy Stigma: Understanding Relationships with Familiarity and Perceived Control

Abstract

Bankruptcy stigma is commonly thought to influence debtors' bankruptcy filing decisions. Despite its importance, researchers have not collected direct quantitative measures of bankruptcy stigma, either in terms of attitudes toward bankruptcy or evaluations of filers. Across two empirical studies, we find that (1) attitudes toward bankruptcy and bankruptcy filers are less negative among those with firsthand bankruptcy experience; (2) bankruptcy stigma is a multidimensional construct that includes morality‐, warmth‐, and competence‐related elements; and (3) consistent with psychological models of blame, filers who are perceived to have more control over the circumstances leading to their bankruptcy are more highly stigmatized. By directly investigating bankruptcy stigma, this research can be used to inform models of consumer decisions about bankruptcy filings and bankruptcy policy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.