A major difficulty in determining the appropriate risk premium for lending to small businesses is the lack of market value information. This paper develops a mean-variance model that uses available failure rate data to establish a benchmark risk premium for lending to firms in specific...

Entrepreneurship is not only used to create a business idea, but also to restructure a business in response to environmental conditions. Firms that issue equity after emerging from bankruptcy are unique in that they exhibit less asymmetric information than other firms that issue equity. They...

A significant number of new business failures can be traced to the fact that the founder(s) missed the mark on many of these traits required for success. They may not have inspired confidence in anyone, including themselves. They may have been easily upset by problems. They may have had...

Much work has been done in the last two decades to estimate the determinants of bankruptcy of large firms. Very little work appears to have been attempted in the area of small firm bankruptcy. This paper goes some way to remedy the deficiency by estimating conditional logistic probability...

There are many studies of bank performance and bank failure in the literature. Most of these studies used banking ratios as variables in their models without giving consideration to their appropriateness, nor was much consideration given to the stability of those ratios through time and across...

Results of many previous studies on the rate of small business failure suggest an inverse relationship between size of business and propensity to fail. However, it has been suggested that this inverse relationship, between firm size and the rate of discontinuance, may more accurately be...

Two recent papers examine the impact of corporate bankruptcy laws on new business start-ups in 29 countries over 1990 - 2008 (Peng et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2010). In this commentary, I briefly point out two significant issues which future researchers might want to consider. First, several countries...

In this article we first argue that researchers in the area of financial distress and failure cannot ignore the human/managerial/decision-making side of the business and just focus on the business' operations side; as has been the case so far for almost all the research in the area. We then...

This paper draws the attention of the new researchers to what has been going on in the Behavioral Finance front and how we can draw from and expand upon such works. By doing so, we hope to find more convincing answers to the key questions that continue to define our fascinating academic niche.

This work examines the leverage ratios of firms covered by the 1998 SSBF Survey. We find that small firms in general are significantly more levered than their larger counterparts in an industry-matched Compustat sample, but the difference is at least partially explained by differences in...