Williams, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based firm in various energy businesses, must decide whether to accept a financing package offered by Berkshire Hathaway and Lehman Brothers. The proposed one-year credit facility would provide the firm with financial resources in a difficult period.

The first chapter studies Entrepreneurship and the Stigma of Failure. Entrepreneurial activity varies substantially across countries and sectors and appears to be related to the stigma of failure. To understand this phenomenon, I present a multiple-equilibrium model based on endogenous stigma of...

We show that collateral constraints restrict firm entry and postentry growth, using French administrative data and cross-sectional variation in local house-price appreciation as shocks to collateral values. We control for local demand shocks by comparing treated homeowners to controls in the...