توسعه اقتصادی و ناتوانی در پرداخت دیون : تنوع منطقه ای و تنظیم

We examine the determinants of forced insolvency in New Zealand. The study incorporates three key features. First, we use regional as well as national data. Second, we analyse the role of property prices, which influence collateral values. Third, we explain the rate of total forced insolvency including personal bankruptcies and involuntary company liquidations. Insolvencies are explained by economic activity, financial variables and collateral values. The interactions between economic activity, leverage and property price (collateral) shocks indicate that region-specific shocks can compound into significant localised economic cycles.

The firm life cycle is one where firms are born; many die early; some survive. Of those that survive childhood, some live through to middle age; some successful firms survive with great longevity. Studies at the individual firm level explain factors determining the likelihood of firms dying or progressing from one stage of the life cycle to the next (Bartelsman & Doms, 2000). Another set of studies examines the determinants of the failure rate at the aggregate level, explaining the proportion of firms that fail over time (Wadhwani, 1986; Platt & Platt, 1994; Vlieghe, 2001). This study is in the latter mould, incorporating three key features. The first is that we use regional as well as national data to explain insolvencies. New Zealand insolvency statistics are disaggregated into six regions which have had a variety of economic experiences over the sample period (1988Q1–2003Q2). The start of the period coincides with the mid-point of New Zealand's major economic reforms including removal of agricultural subsidies, reduction of industry protection, labour market deregulation, privatisation, social welfare reform, fiscal consolidation and anti-inflationary monetary policies (Evans, Grimes, Wilkinson, & Teece, 1996). Regional experiences differed markedly through this reform period and in its aftermath. The major urban centres (Auckland, in particular) grew quickly while many peripheral areas either declined or grew only gradually. (Grimes, Kerr, & Aitken, 2003, documents the effects of these developments on regional property prices.) This diversity of experience assists in analysing the determinants of insolvency when the regional data is treated as a panel.

We estimate Eq. (7) at the aggregate (New Zealand) level, using TIR as the dependent variable and then re-estimate the equation using LTI to check the robustness of our results for the alternative specification of the dependent variable. We further test robustness by disaggregating the dependent variable (LTI) into equations for the log of personal bankruptcies (LBA) and the log of involuntary company liquidations (LIL), using the same equation specification as for LTI. This disaggregation provides further evidence as to whether our aggregation of these two sources of involuntary insolvency is appropriate. The long run estimates for TIR are presented as Eq. (8a), those for LTI are presented as Eq. (8b).13 In each case we have excluded variables with “p-values” that are greater than 0.025 (noting that p-values, shown below coefficients, overstate the significance of a variable when dealing with non-stationary variables). Three variables that appear in our theoretical specification (property values, real wage rates and the nominal interest rate) are not significant in Eqs. (8a) and (8b), and nor is a time trend. The remaining four variables are significant with the expected sign.