In this paper we ask the empirical question are bond covenants priced? Consistent with the Costly Contracting Hypothesis (CCH) developed by Smith and Warner (1979), we find that they are. We document a negative relation between the promised yield on corporate debt issues and the presence of...

Abstract Mandatory convertibles, which are equity-linked hybrid securities that automatically convert to common stock on a pre-specified date, have become an increasingly popular means of raising capital in recent years (about $20 billion worth issued in 2001 alone). This paper presents the...

This paper presents both the time-series and cross-country evidence on the growth of global equity markets and attempts to shed some light on the sources of equity market growth. Using data on 33 countries, I find that development of financial intermediaries and openness to trade are positively...

In this paper, we relate security returns in the thirty securities in the Dow Jones index to regime shifts in the market portfolio (S&P500) volatility. We model market volatility as a multiple-state Markov switching process of order one and estimate non-diversifiable security risk (beta) in the...

Financial institutions (FIs) suffered from non-performing loans when debt-ridden firms failed. Nonetheless, FIs in Korea increased loans to distressed firms in the 1990s. Possible explanations for these loans include FIs having better inside information on borrowing firms, firms' sharing...

The main purpose of this paper is to present the empirical findings derived from the data of small firms that the availability of private and public information on the borrowing firm leads to diverse borrowing patterns among firms. Exploring logit models to characterize the firm's choice of a...

Venture capitalists enjoy incentive-laden compensation schemes where they are paid a fixed amount (management fees) plus a share of profit (success fees). This scheme is of course intended to provide venture capitalists with strong incentives under the heavy information asymmetry (Sahlman, 1982,...

We examine the dynamic forecasting behavior of security analysts in response to their prior performance relative to their peers within a continuous time/multi-period framework. Our model predicts a U-shaped relationship between the boldness of an analyst's forecast, that is, the deviation of her...

If country and currency risk premiums are positively correlated, a negative international liquidity shock harms twice the economy, thereby substantially increasing interest rates. This harmful positive correlation between country and currency risk premiums observed in some countries is called...

We propose a semi-parametric approach to investigate whether co-dependence across markets increase in periods of extreme returns. Given that returns on one market fall in the extreme tail of their own distribution, we compute the conditional probability that returns on another market will also...