The significant rise in U.S. bankruptcy filings that started in 2008 peaked in 2010 when almost 1.6 million bankruptcies were filed. The trend in such filings since then has generally been declining with, for example, a modest decline of 1.8 percent in 2018 compared to 2017. These fluctuations in the filing rates have important implications for the cost and availability of credit and, thus, economic growth and development. Accordingly, the underlying causes of the fluctuations have received much attention in the literature. Much of this attention, however, has focused at the national and state levels with relatively little attention given to smaller geographical areas like counties which play an important role in the bankruptcy filing process. In this paper, we attempt to shed some light on the causes of differences in bankruptcy filing rates in the counties in Pennsylvania by applying dynamic panel data estimators to data for the 2000 to 2016 period.