We develop a dynamic model of banking to assess the effects of liquidity and leverage requirements on banks' insolvency risk. In this model, banks face taxation, flotation costs of securities, and default costs and maximize shareholder value by making their financing, liquid asset holdings, and...

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 investigate the compensation of counterparty exposure in the prices of structured products. Our analysis reveals that product issuers do not compensate retail investors for counterparty exposure before the Lehman default. Post-Lehman, retail prices no longer neglect this risk. We also measure...

Recent regulation mandating the clearing of credit default swaps (CDS) by a Central Clearing Counterparties (CCP), has rendered the latter a systemically important institution, whose failure poses a serious threat to global financial stability. This work investigates the potential failure of a...

We investigate the channel through which fluctuations in the market liquidity of real-sector repo collateral cause arbitrage crashes and failure of systemically important intermediaries during the global financial crisis. Intermediaries pledge productive capital as repo collateral to fund the...

Using a dynamic model of financing, investment, and macroeconomic risk, we investigate when firms sell assets to fund investments (financing asset sales) across the business cycle. Equity financed investment transfers wealth from equity to debt because asset volatility declines and earnings...

We analyze portfolio credit risk in light of dynamic quot;frailty,quot; by which the credit qualities of different firms depend on common unobservable time-varying default covariates. Frailty is estimated to have a large impact on estimated conditional mean default rates, above and beyond those...

Return anomalies are most pronounced among distressed stocks. We attribute this finding to the role of misvaluation and investors' inability to value distressed stocks correctly. We treat distressed stocks as options and construct a valuation model that explicitly takes into account the value of...

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...

We argue that the prospect of an imperfect enforcement of debt contracts in default reduces shareholder-debtholder conflicts and induces leveraged firms to invest more and take on less risk as they approach financial distress. To test these predictions, we use a large panel of firms in 41...