Farming is dangerous, with fatalities among the highest in any occupation. Farmers often work alone, for long hours, with unreliable equipment and in difficult weather conditions with hazardous chemicals and livestock. In addition, farmers make large financial commitments exposing them to high levels of financial risk. Exposure to such financial risk can give rise to subjective experiences of f...

The operating status of an enterprise is disclosed periodically in a financial statement. Financial distress prediction is important for business bankruptcy prevention, and various quantitative prediction methods based on financial ratios have been proposed. This paper presents a financial distress prediction model based on wavelet neural networks (WNNs). The transfer functions of the neurons i...

We investigate the disciplining role of debt in the publicly held firm by examining the relation between employee productivity and financial leverage. The unique feature of our study is that we incorporate outside employment opportunities for employees into the analysis. Consistent with the notion that the debt serves as a bonding mechanism because agents exert additional effort to avoid the pe...

The deadweight costs of financial distress limit many firms’ incentive to include a lot of (taxadvantaged) debt in their capital structures. It is therefore puzzling that firms do not make advance arrangements to re-capitalize themselves if large losses occur. Financial distress may be particularly important for large banking firms, which national supervisors are reluctant to let fail. The supe...

We characterize the evolution over time of a credit network as a system of coupled stochastic processes, each one of which describes the dynamics of individual financial robustness. The coupling comes from the connectivity of the network, since each agents’ financial robustness is associated with the financial robustness of the partners through risk sharing, distress propagation and the bankrup...