"The recent financial crisis has generated many structural changes within the economy. Many issues are ongoing, and the question of how to recover from the crisis, and how to avoid another one, are continually addressed by scholars and practitioners everywhere. Where there is much discussion...

This paper studies the effects of systematic distress and sectoral distress in the context of default/bankruptcy prediction using a large sample of U.S. public company default data from 1991 to 2009. I construct measures to proxy for economy-wide systematic distress and sectoral distress based...