Debt Structure and Bankruptcy of Financially Distressed Small Businesses

Daisuke Tsuruta and Peng Xu

Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI)

Abstract: Using a large sample of financially distressed small firms in Japan, we find that a distressed firm goes bankrupt faster if it uses proportionately more trade credits. Financially distressed firms experiencing a sharp decrease in trade payables are also more likely to go bankrupt. This suggests that coordination failure among a large number of dispersed trade creditors contributes to the bankruptcy of financially distressed firms. This finding supports the hypothesis that suppliers have an incentive to acquire credit information on distressed firms, and are able to do so more quickly than banks. Accordingly, they withdraw credits more quickly because trade credits, unlike bank loans, are unsecured.

Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2007-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-ent
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/07e032.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eti:dpaper:07032

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by TANIMOTO, Toko ().