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...

Although the cost of financial distress is a central issue in capital structure and credit risk studies, reliable estimates of its size are difficult to come by. This paper proposes a novel method of extracting the cost of default from the change in the market value of a firm's assets upon...

We develop a model of the joint capital structure decisions of banks and their borrowers. Strikingly high bank leverage emerges naturally from the interplay between two sets of forces. First, seniority and diversification reduce bank asset volatility by an order of magnitude relative to that of...

We study the optimal timing of security issuance to finance a new project when the firm's assets in place have unobservable quality. Stochastic cash flows generated by assets in place reveal information about their quality and simultaneously reduce the required outside funding. A high-quality...