The aim of this study was to investigate whether firms’ reporting delays are interconnected with bankruptcy risk and its financial determinants. This study was based on 698,189 firm-year observations from Estonia. Annual report submission delay, either in a binary or ordinal form, was used as...

We study the impact of the COVID-19 recession on capital structure of publicly listed U.S. firms. Our estimates suggest leverage (Net Debt/Asset) decreased by 5.3 percentage points from the pre-shock mean of 19.6 percent, while debt maturity increased moderately. This de-leveraging effect is...

The goal of this paper is to show that household-level financial distress (FD) varies greatly, meaning there is unequal exposure to macroeconomic risk, and that FD can increase macroeconomic vulnerability. To do this, we first establish three facts: (i) regions in the U.S. vary significantly in...

We develop a unified framework to connect cash holding, debt maturity and mergers and acquisitions. We provide empirical support for four internally consistent predictions: i) equity and debt values of highly distressed firms are more sensitive to cash reserve than those of healthy firms; ii)...

The paper investigates the determinants of bankruptcy in three representative unbalanced samples of Italian firms for the periods 1989-1991, 1992-94 and 1995-97. Two important results are that: i) the degree of relative firm inefficiency measured as the distance from the efficient frontier has...