This paper uses a principal/agent framework to analyze consumer bankruptcy. The bankruptcy discharge partly insures risk-averse borrowers against bad income realizations but also reduces the borrower’s incentive to avoid insolvency. Among our results are the following: (a) high bankruptcy exemptions increase bankruptcy insurance but at the cost of reducing the borrower’s incentives to stay solv...

Models of capital investment in industrial organization typically treat bankruptcy as an involuntary and final outcome, yet firms that file under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code typically do so voluntarily and with the expectation that they will eventually emerge. Moreover, Chapter 11 permits cancellation or renegotiation of longterm contracts for labor and capital, effectively providing...

Bankruptcy is a highly significant worldwide problem with high social costs. Traditional bankruptcy risk models have been criticized for falling short with respect to bankruptcy theory building due to either modeling assumptions or model complexity. Genetic programming minimizes the amount of a priori structure that is associated with traditional functional forms and statistical selection proce...

While prior papers have examined the impact of state exemption and garnishment laws on the average household, this paper is the first to examine their heterogeneous impact. In my theoretical model, households choose between three options: repayment, bankruptcy, and informal bankruptcy (non-repayment without the benefit of the formal bankruptcy process). The model makes two predictions about the...

6007 Background: The risk of bankruptcy for cancer patients is not well characterized and may vary by cancer type, treatment, and personal factors. Linking the Washington State SEER registry with Western District of Washington bankruptcy court records, we measured the rate of bankruptcy after cancer and identified factors that increased risk among common cancers. METHODS We included adults ag...

Prediction of corporate bankruptcy is a phenomenon of increasing interest to investors/creditors, borrowing firms, and governments alike. Timely identification of firms’ impending failure is indeed desirable. By this time, several methods have been used for predicting bankruptcy but some of them suffer from underlying shortcomings. In recent years, Genetic Programming (GP) has reached great att...

Financial distress prediction is always important for financial institutions in order for them to assess the financial health of enterprises and individuals. Bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring are two important issues in financial distress prediction where various statistical and machine learning techniques have been employed to develop financial prediction models. Since there are no gene...

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...