On the Geographic and Cultural Determinants of Bankruptcy

This paper examines the role of geography and culture in explaining bankruptcy. We adopt survival analyses to model the bankruptcy risk of a firm, allowing for time-varying covariates. Based on a large sample from all major sectors of the Swiss economy, we find the following results: (i) The geographic location of a firm, which is characterized using a core-periphery approach, has a significant impact on its bankruptcy risk; (ii) Variables proxying for the cultural environment of a firm have significant explanatory power; (iii) The results of the previous literature on the standard determinants of bankruptcy are confirmed.bankruptcy, geography, culture, exit

The geographic determinants of bankruptcy: evidence from Switzerland

This paper examines the geographic determinants of firm bankruptcy. We employ hazard rate models to study the bankruptcy risk of a firm, allowing for time-varying covariates. Based on a large sample from all geographic areas and the major sectors of the Swiss economy, we find the following main results: (1) Bankruptcy rates tend to be lower in the central municipalities of agglomerations; (2) bankruptcy rates are lower in regions with favorable business conditions (where corporate taxes and unemployment are low and public investment is high); (3) private taxes and public spending at the local level have little impact on bankruptcy rate

Communicating with Cost-based Implicature: a Game-Theoretic Approach to Ambiguity

A game-theoretic approach to linguistic communication predicts that speakers can meaningfully use ambiguous forms in a discourse context in which only one of several available referents has a costly unambiguous form and in which rational interlocutors share knowledge of production costs. If a speaker produces a low-cost ambiguous form to avoid using the high-cost unambiguous form, a rational listener will infer that the high-cost entity was the intended entity, or else the speaker would not have risked ambiguity. We report data from two studies in which pairs of speakers show alignment of their use of ambiguous forms based on this kind of shared knowledge. These results extend the analysis of cost-based pragmatic inferencing beyond that previously associated only with fixed lexical hosts.