摘要：Using statistics assembled from most of the 94 United States judicial districts, this
paper provides the first comprehensive examination of bankruptcy refiling rates. The
study employs two measures to quantify this phenomenon. The first, repeat filings, is
defined as the percentage of personal bankruptcy filings that result from a debtor filing
more than once. The second, repeat filers, is the percentage of debtors who have filed
more than once. A repeat filer is not necessarily an abusive filer, and this paper does
not examine abusive filers¡ªdebtors who take advantage of the bankruptcy system to
avoid paying their debts.
The study found that 16% of filings nationwide were repeat filings, and 8% of
filers were repeat filers. As one would expect, percentages varied from circuit to
circuit and district to district.1 For example, in the Second Circuit, the percentage of
repeat filings was 12%, whereas in the Sixth Circuit, the percentage of repeat filings
was 19%. The variation among the judicial districts was even greater, with the District
of Utah and the Western District of Tennessee exhibiting the highest percentages (35
and 46%, respectively) and the District of Maine and the District of North Dakota
exhibiting the lowest (4% each) among those courts included in our study. The paper
discusses implications of district differences in the proportion of filings that are repeat
filings, and the degree to which filings by repeat filers in a district may influence a
district's statistics on per-capita bankruptcy filings.2
