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...

This paper examines local bias in the context of venture capital (VC) investments. Based on a sample of US VC investments between 1980 and June 2009, we find more reputable VCs (older, larger, more experienced, and with stronger IPO track record) and VCs with broader networks exhibit less local...

This paper provides a compact summary of the evidence on capital structure instability and a case-based exploratory investigation of sources of such instability. Substantial instability in capital structure is the norm at publicly held nonfinancial firms. Firm-specific episodes of leverage...

The purpose of the article is to analyse the impact of various financial ratios used to evaluate a company’s liquidity and solvency on the rates of return on the shares of companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. In the context of developing countries, the relationship between liquidity...

Proactive deleveraging from all-time peak market leverage (ML) to near-zero ML and negative net debt is the norm among 4,476 nonfinancial firms with five or more years of post-peak data. ML is 0.543 at the historical peak and 0.026 at the later trough for the median firm in this sample, with a...

Recent revelations on the use of fiduciary services by the wealthy and political leaders raise concerns regarding the use of such services for tax and creditor evasion. Yet given the secrecy shrouding much of the fiduciary industry, we do not know which fiduciary services are used for such...

In this paper, I relax one of the common assumptions made in standard school choice problems by allowing students to rank not just schools, but school-cohort sized pairs. The intuition for this extension is the observation that a school at maximum capacity is not the same object, from a...

Through this paper the author discusses the phenomenon of excessive Government borrowing and the factors that lead Governments to be so dependent on financial markets. It is argued that the combined effect of unregulated financial intermediaries, hedge funds and Credit Rating Agencies in...

France has a long and unique experience of public intervention in household debt restructuring. When facing financial distress, households can file a case to a “households' over-indebtedness commission” (HOC). These HOCs either grant a delay of payment or impose a partial reimbursement of...

This paper employs spatial econometrics techniques to estimate the impact of bankruptcy regulation on small firm formation. The estimation of the model is computationally challenging due to the joint appearance of a lagged endogenous variable and the unobserved heterogeneity which requires...