Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the fate of firms that report negative book-value equity leading up to the 2008 Great Recession. This is the first study to document the quantity and longevity of negative equity firms and to analyze the sources of funds used to sustain these failing and recovering firms. For the full sample of Compustat from 1970 to 2007, negative-equity firms account for 9.66% of the 246,869 firm-year observations. The number of firms reporting negative equity steadily increases over the sample period, with less than 1% of the firms reporting negative equity in 1970 to more than 10% in 2007. Upon initially reporting negative equity, these firms remain active on average for an additional 6.18 years. Distressed firms appear to have a remarkable ability to generate substantial funds through short-term and long-term debt and through the issuance of stock, thereby postponing or avoiding costly bankruptcy. While negative equity firms may not have caused the 2008 Great Recession, the findings of this study reveal a disturbing trend that warrants further research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".