Food processing establishments incur costs to install, maintain, and operate equipment and implement specific food safety practices. During times of economic recession, establishments might reduce their food safety efforts to conserve resources and reduce costs of operation. This study was conducted to determine whether financial performance measures are systematically associated with Salmonel...

We analyze the competitive capacity investment timing decisions of both established firms and start-ups entering new markets which are characterized by a high degree of demand uncertainty. Firms may invest in capacity early (when the market is highly uncertain) or late (when market uncertainty has been resolved), possibly at different costs. In our model, established firms choose investment tim...

When liability is limited by bankruptcy, theory says that firms will take excessive environmental and public health risks. In the long run, this “judgmentproof problem” may increase the share of small producers, even when there are economies of scale. I use quasi-experimental variation in liability exposure to measure the effects of bankruptcy protection on industry structure and environmental ...

We predict the onset of personal bankruptcy using least squares regression. Although well publicized, only 2,244 bankruptcies occur in our data set of 2.9 million months of credit-card activity. We use stepwise selection to find predictors of these from a mix of payment history, debt load, demographics, and their interactions. This combination of rare responses and over 67,000 possible predicto...

We investigate the inventory stocking and capital structure decisions of a firm in the presence of an asset-based credit limit and costly bankruptcy. The key aspect of the paper is that we model the simultaneous decisions of an equity investor, the manager of the firm, and a bank. The investor decides how much to invest in the equity of the firm. The firm, a newsvendor, takes the investor’s dec...

Over the last decade, the topic of bankruptcy has been an object of growing concern. In Canada, the number of business bankruptcies under the Bankruptcy Act has risen significantly since the beginning of the 1980s. From 6,595 in 1980, the number of bankruptcies rose to 8,664 in 1989, to 14,317 in 1992 to finally settle at 11,810 in 1994.1 In addition, a large but uncertain number of business fa...

We predict the onset of personal bankruptcy using least squares regression. Although well publicized, only 2,244 bankruptcies occur in our data set of 2.9 million months of credit-card activity. We use stepwise selection to find predictors from a mix of payment history, debt load, demographics, and their interactions. This combination of rare responses and over 67,000 possible predictors leads ...

BACKGROUND Our 2001 study in 5 states found that medical problems contributed to at least 46.2% of all bankruptcies. Since then, health costs and the numbers of un- and underinsured have increased, and bankruptcy laws have tightened. METHODS We surveyed a random national sample of 2314 bankruptcy filers in 2007, abstracted their court records, and interviewed 1032 of them. We designated bankr...