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This study combines theories of accumulating disadvantage and economic insecurity using the event of bankruptcy to investigate how certain adverse life events jointly affect inequality. I analyze National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1985 through 2008 to highlight the complexities of financial hardship in the path to bankruptcy. By applying hybrid mixed effects models to parse out within‐ and between‐person variation, I show that, in the case of bankruptcy, financial hardship unfolds over a specific series of events, which can lead to the accumulation of disadvantage connected to changes in employment, marital, and health statuses. I find that bankruptcy results from people's recent experiences of illness and marital dissolution, but not always directly from employment disruption. The effects of job loss on bankruptcy become more apparent as these events accumulate over time and limit wealth creation. The timing of events and their relationship with net worth also influence when a person will file for bankruptcy. As a whole, my findings demonstrate how adverse events and financial hardship lead to bankruptcy through multiple pathways.

Quantile regression (QR) provides an alternative to linear regression (LR) that allows for the estimation of relationships across the distribution of an outcome. However, as highlighted in recent research on the motherhood penalty across the wage distribution, different procedures for conditional and unconditional quantile regression (CQR, UQR) often result in divergent findings that are not always well understood. In light of such discrepancies, this paper reviews how to implement and interpret a range of LR, CQR, and UQR models with fixed effects. It also discusses the use of Quantile Treatment Effect (QTE) models as an alternative to overcome some of the limitations of CQR and UQR models. We then review how to interpret results in the presence of fixed effects based on a replication of Budig and Hodges's work on the motherhood penalty using NLSY79 data.