This paper argues that the debt forgiveness provided by the U.S. consumer bankruptcy system helped stabilize employment levels during the Great Recession. We document that over this period, states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions had significantly smaller declines in non-tradable...

Abstract We analyse micro data on Irish mortgages and distressed households’ balance sheets in the last decade to assess the debt resolution process in the Irish mortgage market in the lead up to the COVID-19 shock. We highlight the widespread engagement of Irish borrowers with debt resolution...

We estimate the impact of COVID-19 on business failures for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) using firm-level data in seventeen countries. Absent government support, the failure rate of SMEs would have increased by 9.1 percentage points, representing 4.6 percent of private sector...

The acceleration of the firm failure rate in France between 2008 and 2010 was preceded by a surge in the number of firms' creations in 2003-2004.Therefore, identifying the impact of the 2008 crisis requires to distinguish, among the failures occurring over the period, those resulting from the...

Previous estimates indicate that COVID-19 led to a large drop in the number of operating businesses operating early in the pandemic, but surprisingly little is known on whether these shutdowns turned into permanent closures and whether small businesses were disproportionately hit. This paper...

Using an extensive new data set on corporate bond defaults in the U.S. from 1866 to 2010, we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises. During the past 150 years, the U.S. has experienced many severe corporate default crises...