The Cost of Recessions Revisited: A Reverse-Liquidationist View

The observation that liquidations are concentrated in recessions has long been the subject of controversy. One view holds that liquidations are beneficial in that they result in increased restructuring. Another view holds that liquidations are privately inefficient and essentially wasteful. This paper proposes an alternative perspective. Based on a combination of theory and empirical evidence on gross job flows and on financial and labor market rents, we find that, cumulatively, recessions result in reduced restructuring, and that this is likely to be socially costly once we consider inefficiencies on both the creation and destruction margins.

Optimization of Fire Sales and Borrowing in Systemic Risk

This paper provides a framework for modeling financial contagion in a network subject to fire sales and price impacts, but allowing for firms to borrow to cover their shortfall as well. We consider both uncollateralized and collateralized loans. The main results of this work are providing sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of the clearing solutions (i.e., payments, liquidations, and borrowing); in such a setting any clearing solution is the Nash equilibrium of an aggregation game

Changes in the number of state banks during 1921-1936, by states

Banks and banking ; Banking market

Aggregate economy risk and company failure: An examination of UK quoted firms in the early 1990s

Considerable attention has been directed in the recent finance and economics literature to issues concerning the effects on company failure risk of changes in the macroeconomic environment. This paper examines the accounting ratio-based and macroeconomic determinants of insolvency exit of UK large industrials during the early 1990s with a view to improve understanding of company failure risk. Failure determinants are revealed from estimates based on a cross-section of 369 quoted firms, which is followed by an assessment of predictive performance based on a series of time-to-failure-specific logit functions, as is typical in the literature. Within the traditional for cross-sectional data studies framework, a more complete model of failure risk is developed by adding to a set of traditional financial statement-based inputs, the two variables capturing aggregate economy risk - one-year lagged, unanticipated changes in the nominal interest rate and in the real exchange rate. Alternative estimates of prediction error are obtained, first, by analytically adjusting the apparent error rate for the downward bias and, second, by generating holdout predictions. More complete, augmented with the two macroeconomic variables models demonstrate improved out-ofestimation- sample classificatory accuracy at risk horizons ranging from one to four years prior to failure, with the results being quite robust across a wide range of cutoff probability values, for both failing and nonfailed firms. Although in terms of the individual ratio significance and overall predictive accuracy, the findings of the present study may not be directly comparable with the evidence from prior research due to differing data sets and model specifications, the results are intuitively appealing. First, the results affirm the important explanatory role of liquidity, gearing, and profitability in the company failure process. Second, the findings for the failure probability appear to demonstrate that shocks from unanticipated changes in interest and exchange rates may matter as much as the underlying changes in firm-specific characteristics of liquidity, gearing, and profitability. Obtained empirical determinants suggest that during the 1990s recession, shifts in the real exchange rate and rises in the nominal interest rate, were associated with a higher propensity of industrial company to exit via insolvency, thus indicating links to a loss in competitiveness and to the effects of high gearing. The results provide policy implications for reducing the company sector vulnerability to financial distress and failure while highlighting that changes in macroeconomic conditions should be an important ingredient of possible extensions of company failure prediction models

Do reorganization costs matter for efficiency ? Evidence from a bankruptcy reform in Colombia

The authors study the effect of reorganization costs on the efficiency of bankruptcy laws. They develop a simple model that predicts that in a regime with high costs, the law fails to achieve the efficient outcome of liquidating unviable businesses and reorganizing viable ones. The authors test the model using the Colombian bankruptcy reform of 1999. Using data from 1,924 firms filing for bankruptcy between 1996 and 2003, they find that the pre-reform reorganization proceeding was so inefficient that it failed to separate economically viable firms from inefficient ones. In contrast, by substantially lowering reorganization costs, the reform improved the selection of viable firms into reorganization. In this sense, the new law increased the efficiency of the bankruptcy system in Colombia.Banks&Banking Reform,Corporate Law,Small Scale Enterprise,Microfinance,Economic Theory&Research

Branch Banking, Bank Competition, and Financial Stability

It is often argued that branching stabilizes banking systems by facilitating diversification of bank portfolios; however, previous empirical research on the Great Depression offers mixed support for this view. Analyses using state-level data find that states allowing branch banking had lower failure rates, while those examining individual banks find that branch banks were more likely to fail. We argue that an alternative hypothesis can reconcile these seemingly disparate findings. Using data on national banks from the 1920s and 1930s, we show that branch banking increases competition and forces weak banks to exit the banking system. This consolidation strengthens the system as a whole without necessarily strengthening the branch banks themselves. Our empirical results suggest that the effects that branching had on competition were quantitatively more important than geographical diversification for bank stability in the 1920s and 1930s.