We examine the mechanism through which a financial crisis affects the default risk of real economy firms. Specifically, firms with strong dependence on bank financing suffer higher increases in default risk than firms with no such dependence. Conversely, firms relying solely on financing from...

In this paper, we use the axioms introduced in Eisenberg and Noe (2001) and Rogers and Veraart (2013) and study their consequences in terms of optimal sets of defaulting firms. We show that, from this point of view, the Absolute Priority axiom is not independent. We also show that the optimal...

This paper assesses the importance of adverse health shocks as triggers of bankruptcy filings. We view car crashes as a proxy for health shocks and draw on a large sample of police crash reports linked to hospital admission records and bankruptcy case files. We report two findings: (i) there is...

During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the US varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. Our message is that household financial health matters for understanding this relationship. Two facts are essential for our finding: (1) the decline in house prices...