There was a total of 1,910 bankruptcies in Canada
in the six-month period from March to August 1996.'
Surveys were sent to a random sample of trustees for
1,085 of these cases and 550 responses were obtained
(51%). A total of 339 of these surveys contained complete
responses to the items of interest to this research
study, including the age of the business at the time of
bankruptcy. Means, standard deviations, and interitem
correlation coefficients are presented in Table 2.
The dependent variable in our models is firm age at
time of bankruptcy. Due to the highly skewed nature of
the age distribution in our sample, we log-normalized
age to better approximate a normal distribution. Of the
firms in the sample 29% were one or two years old at
the time of bankruptcy, 40% were in the three- to nineyear-old
range, and the remaining 30% were ten years
old or more. The mean age of the firms in our sample
was 7.8 years (median 5.0).