It is widely believed that the stock-market oriented US financial system forces corporate managers to behave myopically relative to their Japanese counterparts, who operate in a bank-based system. We hypothesize that if US firms are more myopic than Japanese firms, then episodes of financial...

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...

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 financial decisions of durable goods makers can impose spillovers on their consumers. Namely, durable goods provide a consumption stream that frequently depends on services provided by the manufacturer (e.g., warranties, parts, and maintenance). Manufacturer bankruptcy, or even the...

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 examine the determinants of congressional voting behavior on two of the most significant pieces of federal legislation in U.S. economic history: the American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 and the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. We find evidence that...

Hospitals anchor much of US health care and receive a third of all medical spending, including various subsidies. Nevertheless, some become insolvent and exit the market. Research has documented subsequent access problems; however, less is understood about broader implications. We examine over...

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

Most evidence on foreclosure spillovers identifies localized effects that are modest in magnitude, but these effects could multiply to larger aggregate effects across broad neighborhoods. We test this proposition developing a proxy for the fraction of mortgages in negative equity during the...

This paper studies how innovative firms manage their innovation portfolios after filing for Chapter 11 reorganization using three decades of data. We find that they sell off core (i.e., technologically critical and valuable), rather than peripheral, patents in bankruptcy. The selling pattern is...