Revised Oct 2016. We test the hypothesis that income inequality causes financial distress. To identify the effect of income inequality, we examine lottery prizes of random dollar magnitudes in the context of very small neighborhoods (13 households on average). We find that a C$1,000 increase in...

SUPRSEDES WP 18-16 We examine whether relative income differences among peers can generate financial distress. Using lottery winnings as plausibly exogenous variations in the relative income of peers, we find that the dollar magnitude of a lottery win of one neighbor increases subsequent...

Foster and Hart propose a measure of riskiness for discrete random variables. Their defining equation has no solution for many common continuous distributions. We show how to extend consistently the definition of riskiness to continuous random variables. For many continuous random variables, the...

Small businesses, the majority of Spanish firms, rarely file for formal bankruptcy when dealing with financial distress. This is why business bankruptcy rates in Spain are among the lowest in the world, even during the current economic crisis. To explain this fact we present the following...