The optimal investment-dividend policy of a financially constrained firm whose earnings are subject to additive shocks is shown to exhibit several stylized economic and financial features of the firm life cycle which usually require considerably more complex models. This parsimonious model...

Inspired by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and its consequences on the global financial system, we develop a simple model in which the Lehman default event is quantified as having an almost immediate effect in worsening the credit worthiness of all financial institutions in the economic...

We develop a model of investment, payout, and financing policies in which firms face uncertainty regarding their ability to raise funds and have to search for investors when in need of capital. We show that capital supply uncertainty leads firms to value financial slack and to adjust their...

In a dynamic model of optimal bailouts, we show how borrower myopia affects the severity of debt crises. Myopic borrowers misprice the option to default with a U-shaped negative pricing error. The myopia discount changes the optimal bailout policy. Myopia gets punished when the distortions from...

This paper proposes a machine learning approach to estimate physical forward default intensities. Default probabilities are computed using artificial neural networks to estimate the intensities of the inhomogeneous Poisson processes governing default process. The major contribution to previous...

Firms with credit-default swaps (CDS) traded on their debt may face "empty creditors'' as hedged creditors have less incentive to participate in firm restructuring. We test for the existence of empty creditors by employing an exogenous change to the bankruptcy code in Germany, that effectively...

We study an optimal dividend problem under a bankruptcy constraint. Firms face a trade-off between potential bankruptcy and extraction of profits. In contrast to previous works, general cash flow drifts, including Ornstein–Uhlenbeck and CIR processes, are considered. We provide rigorous proofs...

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager-shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. Using panel data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we show that while refinancing costs help explain the...