Stata Dataset _repository.xlsx

Our dataset is based upon all the bankruptcy proceedings started by 688 companies over the 7 different tribunals of the Italian Veneto Region. Thanks to a collaboration with the Venice Chamber of Commerce, we inspected the archived bankruptcy files, gathering 4,965 bankruptcy documents from which we manually extracted the causes of firms’ default according to the taxonomy provided by Blazy et al. (2011, 2013). To make our procedure as rigorous as possible, we applied the Gioia Methodology (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991; Gioia et al., 2012), a systematic approach for new concepts development (see Gioia et al., 2012) applied to text analysis. Accordingly, two coders processed the legal papers and generated two independent classifications of causes of default. Comparing the two lists we then converged toward a unique classification of seven causes of default, in line with Blazy et al. (2011, 2013): Strategy, Production, Finance, Management, External environment, Outlets, and Accident. Then we collected accounting data from AIDA over the same time frame.