We use data on financially distressed Chinese companies in order to study a debt market where property rights are crudely defined and poorly enforced. To help with identification we use an event where a business-friendly province published new guidelines regarding the administration and...

This paper considers lending to finance projects in a setting where repayment enforcement appears impossible. The loan was illegal and thus legally unenforceable. Creditors were incapable of applying private coercion to force repayment. Borrowers lacked both collateral and reputation capital....

This study empirically examine the impact of market conditions on credit spreads as motivated by recently developed structural credit risk models. Using credit default swap (CDS) spreads, we find that, in the time series, average credit spreads are decreasing in GDP growth rate, but increasing...

We examine the effects of credit default swaps (CDS), a major type of over-thecounter derivative, on the corporate liquidity management of the reference firms. CDS help firms to access the credit market since the lenders can hedge their credit risk more easily using these contracts. However,...

Can monetary stimulus boost corporate investment? We answer this question by studying ECB's 2011-2012 Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (LTROs), which provided cheap funding to Eurozone banks. We find that, relative to their non-Eurozone counterparts, Eurozone firms invested more after the...

Many recent studies have looked at the macroeconomic, cultural and institutional determinants of corruption at the cross-national level. This study complements these existing cross-country studies by focusing on firm-level evidence of microeconomic factors affecting bribes paid in a single...