We examine whether individuals are influenced to file for bankruptcy by the past bankruptcies of their close neighbors. We find that a one standard deviation increase in neighborhood bankruptcies increases the probability of defaulting via bankruptcy rather than via credit card charge-off by 6%. Our individual level data on defaulters is from detailed credit card accounts, which is matched to n...

With the recent financial crisis and European debt crisis, corporate bankruptcy prediction has become an increasingly important issue for financial institutions. Many statistical and intelligent methods have been proposed, however, there is no overall best method has been used in predicting corporate bankruptcy. Recent studies suggest ensemble learning methods may have potential applicability i...

In this paper we analyze the relationship between strictness of employment protection and efficiency of bankruptcy law. We argue that country’s legal tradition provides the appropriate institutional proxy to explain the nature of such relationship. We find that for civil law countries where bankruptcy procedures are more inefficient a stricter employment protection policy is enforced. For commo...

Are consumers who have filed for personal bankruptcy before excluded from the unsecured credit market? Using a unique data set of credit card mailings, we directly explore the supply of unsecured credit to consumers with the most conspicuous default risk—those with a bankruptcy history. On average, over one-fifth of personal bankruptcy filers receive at least one offer in a given month, with th...

in financial distress studies selection of variable is commonly basedon the success of variables in variable sets employed in earlierbankruptcy studies, suggestions in the literature or an accompanyingdata reduction in a large set of variables. if seemingly different variablesets exhibit a strong relationship then heterogeneous variable setscapture common information. canonical correlation anal...