Secured lenders have recently demanded a new condition in distressed debt restructurings: competing secured lenders must lose priority. We model the implications of this "creditor-on-creditor violence" trend. In our dynamic model, secured lenders enjoy higher priority in default. However,...

In the last dozen years, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country’s laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. Much of this research has dealt with rules...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced—or has failed to influence—federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH has...

Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings should be 'safer' and have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary motive for saving cash, which in our model causes...

We examine how equity-market frictions that restrict pessimistic trading, such as short-sale constraints, affect assessments of default risk. We find that these frictions decrease the usefulness of equity-market variables for identifying defaulting firms but increase their usefulness for...