COVID-19 placed a special role to fiscal policy in rescuing companies short of liquidity from insolvency. In the first months of the crisis, SMEs as the backbone of Europe’s real economy benefited from large and mainly indiscriminate aid measures. Avoiding business failures in a whatever it...

Winners in online auctions frequently fail to complete purchases. Major auction platforms therefore allow "second-chance" offers, where the runner-up bidder pays his own bid price, and they let sellers leave negative feedback on buyers who default. We show theoretically that (i) all else equal,...

How does bank distress impact their customers' probability of default and trade credit availability? We address this question by looking at a unique sample of German firms from 2000 to 2011. We follow their firm-bank relationships through times of distress and crisis, featuring the different...

In this paper, we report results of an ongoing empirical analysis of firm dynamics in East Germany. After discussing specifics of a newly available data set with information on more than 100.000 firms, we analyze patterns of business starts and failures. Furthermore, we present preliminary...

Correlated defaults and systemic risk are clearly priced in credit portfolio securities such as CDOs or index CDSs. In this paper we study an extensive CDX data set for evidence whether correlated defaults are also present in the underlying CDS market. We develop a cash flow based top-down...