"This paper provides new evidence regarding the information content of debt ratings. We show that noninvestment grade subordinated issues are consistently priced too high (the yield is too low), and the reverse is true for some investment grade bonds. We relate this empirical bias to a notching...

We use a sample of small firms to compare efficiency aspects of the creditor-oriented old Finnish bankruptcy code and the debtor-oriented US code. We find that although the same economic factors affect liquidations in both the US and Finland, Finnish firms are somewhat more likely to be...