type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>We explore the link between a firm's stock returns and credit risk using a simple insight from structural models following Merton (<link href="#jofi12143-bib-0033"/>): risk premia on equity and credit instruments are related because all claims on assets must earn the same compensation per unit of risk....</p>

This paper documents aggregate trends in the foreign listings of companies, and analyzes their distinctive prelisting characteristics and postlisting performance. In 1986-1997, many European companies listed abroad, mainly on U.S. exchanges, while the number of U.S. companies listed in Europe...

The authors show that risk characteristics of projects' cash flows are endogenously determined by the investment decisions of all firms in an industry. As a result, in reasonable settings, financial structures which create incentives to expropriate debtholders by increasing risk are shown not to...

We derive the optimal labor contract for a levered firm in an economy with perfectly competitive capital and labor markets. Employees become entrenched under this contract and so face large human costs of bankruptcy. The firm's optimal capital structure therefore depends on the trade-off between...

This paper develops a model of dynamic capital structure choice in the presence of recapitalization costs. The theory provides the optimal dynamic recapitalization policy as a function of firm-specific characteristics. The authors find that even small recapitalization costs lead to wide swings...

This paper shows that, even in the presence of a perfectly competit ive banking industry, it is optimal for firms with market power to en gage in vendor financing if credit customers have lower reservation prices than cash customers, or if adverse selection makes it infeasible to write credit...

If management has high private benefits and a small equity stake, managers and workers are natural allies against takeover threats. Two forces are at play. First, managers can transform employees into a "shark repellent" through long-term labor contracts and thereby reduce the firm's...