A firm may leave an industry in at least three ways: through merger, voluntary liquidation, or bankruptcy. There are important economic differences between forms of exit, yet previous work has treated exits as homogeneous. This article develops a model of the relation between the forms of exit...

The rate of business failures is widely quoted but is little understood. This study reviews the availability and usefulness of data on business failures and discusses the major determinants of fluctuations in the business failure rate. It shows that the age distribution of the population of...