Dun's Review began publishing monthly data on bankruptcies by branch of business during the 1890s. This essay reconstructs that series, links it to its successors, and discusses how it can be used for economic analysis

A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the...

The covid-19 crisis has led to a sharp deterioration in firm and bank balance sheets. The government has responded with a massive intervention in corporate credit markets. We study equilibrium dynamics of macroeconomic quantities and prices, and how they are affected by government policy. The...

International trade exposure affects job creation and destruction along the intensive margin (job flows due to expansions and contractions of firms' employment) as well as along the extensive margin (job flows due to births and deaths of firms). This paper uses 1992-2011 employment data from the...

The behavior of firms in financial distress has attracted considerable academic and policy interest in recent years. The turmoil in the U.S. airline industry has triggered much of the public policy discussion, as some observers have argued that airlines in financial distress, particularly those...

An iconic model with high leverage and overvalued collateral assets is used to illustrate the amplification mechanism driving asset prices to 'overshoot' equilibrium when an asset bubble bursts--threatening widespread insolvency and what Richard Koo calls a 'balance sheet recession'. Besides...

In 2003, after claims of dumping, the U.S. imposed heavy tariffs on imports of catfish from Vietnam. As a result, Vietnamese exports of catfish to the U.S. market sharply declined. Using a panel data of Vietnamese households, we explore the responses of catfish producers in the Mekong delta...

We study the impact of the introduction of a form of bankruptcy protection on household investment in the U.S. South in the 1840s, which predated modern bankruptcy laws. During this period, certain southern states passed laws that protected married women's property from seizure in the case of...

Using a comprehensive sample of trades by Schedule 13D filers, who possess valuable private information when they accumulate stocks of targeted companies, this paper studies whether several liquidity measures reveal the presence of informed trading. The evidence suggests that when Schedule 13D...

We use the unique circumstances that led to the Panic of 1907 to analyze its impact on economic activity. The panic was fuelled by runs on the 'shadow banks' of the time, New York's trust companies. But the shock that triggered the runs was unrelated to the nonfinancial corporations affiliated...