We investigate the joint effect of production capacity choices and capital structure decisions on corporate debt default - related yield spreads. We find that the main driver of credit spreads is the incentive of self-interested shareholders to cash out assets in an economic decline and to...

The auction rate bond market grew from inauspicious beginnings in 1985 to representing a significant fraction of the municipal bond market in 2007 with a total of 603 issuances that year raising more than $35 billion in capital. Since March of 2008 not a single auction rate bond has been issued....

We investigate the risk and return of a wide variety of trading strategies involving options on the S&P 500. We consider naked and covered positions, straddles, strangles, and calendar spreads, with different maturities and levels of moneyness. Overall, we ï¬nd that strategies involving short...

Does the ability of suppliers of corporate debt capital to hedge risk through credit default swap (CDS) contracts impact firms' capital structures? We find that firms with traded CDS contracts on their debt are able to maintain higher leverage ratios and longer debt maturities. This is...

We provide evidence that trading frictions have an economically important impact on the execution and the profitability of option strategies that involve writing out-of-the-money put options. Margin requirements, in particular, limit the notional amount of capital that can be invested in the...

We study the cross-section of stock option returns by sorting stocks on the difference between historical realized volatility and at-the-money implied volatility. We find that a zero-cost trading strategy that is long (short) in the portfolio with a large positive (negative) difference between...

The market for auction rate securities (ARS) made headlines during the second week of February 2008 when auctions at which the bonds' interest rates reset experienced a wave of "failures." Contrary to headlines that attribute the failures to a "frozen" market or investors' "irrationality," we...

We investigate the risk and return of a variety of trading strategies involving options on the Samp;P 500. Overall, we find that strategies that short options constitute very good deals. However, exploiting these good deals can be extremely difficult. Trading costs and margin requirements...