Our investigation examined the impact of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) activities on corporate financial distress. This research utilised data from companies listed in the FTSE All-Share index from 2014 to 2022 from the Refinitiv EIKON database. We incorporated year- and...

Theory suggests that corporate and sovereign bonds are fundamentally different, also because sovereign debt has no bankruptcy mechanism and is hard to enforce. We show empirically that the two assets are more similar than you think, at least when it comes to high-yield bonds over the past 20...

We develop a simple model of financial intermediation with search and matching frictions between banks and firms. The model links credit market tightness -encapsulating the abundance of credit- to the search and opportunity costs of credit intermediation. Search costs generate lending to...

Theory suggests that corporate and sovereign bonds are fundamentally different, also because sovereign debt has no bankruptcy mechanism and is hard to enforce. We show empirically that the two assets are more similar than you think, at least when it comes to high-yield bonds over the past 20...

This paper documents a new consequence of market integration: local reallocation, i.e., the exit of some workers from production even though employment increases in the same area and industry. Thanks to new data on over 150,000 personal bankruptcies combined with detailed microcensus data from...

Assessing insolvency dynamics is essential for evaluating the financial health of nonfinancial corporations and mitigating macroeconomic and financial stability risks. This study leverages a newly created Statistics Canada dataset linking insolvency records with firm-level financial data to...

Using a large sample of US Bank Holding Companies during 1995-2023, we find that a standard measure of franchise value predicts lower bank capitalization and higher bank risk of insolvency. The franchise value hypothesis (FVH), postulating a negative relationship between bank franchise value and...

The paper investigates the influence of creditor rights reforms on leverage. Based on a partial equilibrium agency cost model, we propose a novel channel running from the owner/manager's private bankruptcy costs to leverage. Such costs mitigate the firms' agency problem toward creditors, thereby...

Using linked employer-employee data combined with administrative data on debt enforcement, we analyze the impact of job loss on debt problems in Finland, where even 50% of income may be subject to wage garnishment for up to 25 years. Our results show that job loss, defined by plant closures and...

We examine the 2025 U.S. debt limit episode through the lens of financial markets. First, we document an increase in trading activity in the U.S. sovereign CDS market, and we infer a probability of default from CDS premiums. We find that default risk reached 1% by the November 6 Presidential...

This study investigates carbon pricing-induced credit risk, the potential negative impact of carbon pricing on firms' ability to meet their financial obligations. Applying a well-established credit assessment model to a novel data set combining financial statements and emissions data, we subject...

We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians to a reform, approved in Italy in 2011, that introduces stringent individual financial and career sanctions to local administrators who are judged responsible for their municipality’s bankruptcy. To this aim, we leverage exogenous...

Research on government procurement emphasizes its positive impacts, while paying insufficient attention to the risks posed by government arrears. We show that the implementation of China's Special Supervision Action for Repaying Government Arrears significantly enhances employee treatment,...

Countries differ in their approaches to the treatment of tax claims in insolvency. Historically, most countries have granted priority to tax claims. In the late 20th century, however, some countries abolished or reduced tax priorities at the same time that sweeping insolvency reforms were...

Countries around the world are introducing or improving their personal insolvency regimes, but frequently the effects of these reforms are not evaluated, and the reforms themselves are not supported by adequate data analysis. This paper proposes the establishment and implementation of data...

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered widespread economic disruptions, raising concerns about surging bankruptcy rates globally. Italy, one of the hardest-hit countries, faced significant risks of business insolvency. This paper empirically investigates the short-term impact of government...

One primary objective of the early warning system literature is to construct more accurate financial vulnerability prediction models and investigate the mechanisms and key factors that differentiate healthy from vulnerable financial states. Despite the importance of identifying and predicting...

This paper studies the joint distribution of the default and prepayment losses for a large portfolio of loans, based on a bottom-up approach. The repayment behaviors of loans in the portfolio are determined by both systematic and idiosyncratic risk factors and are conditionally independent given...

This study aims to combine deep and recurrent neural networks with a reduced-form portfolio model to predict future default rates across economic sectors. The industry-specific forecasts for Italian default rates produced with the proposed approach demonstrate its effectiveness, achieving...