We investigate the liquidity management of firms following the inception of credit default swaps (CDS) markets on their debt, which allow hedging and speculative trading on credit risk to be carried out by creditors and other parties. We find that reference firms hold more cash after CDS trading...

We estimate the economic costs of financial distress due to lost sales, by exploiting cross-supplier variation in real estate assets and leverage and the timing of real estate shocks. We show that for the same client buying from different suppliers, its purchases from distressed suppliers...

Shareholders in distressed firms should profit from shifting to more risky assets, but there is little empirical evidence documenting such behavior. We find that this weak evidence is consistent with creditors being somewhat able to control the investment policies of distressed firms if distress...

In a typical "phoenix syndrome" scenario, a small business entrepreneur who controls the financially distressed Company A registers Company B, to which the assets of Company A are transferred in what appears to be fraudulent conveyance. Company B serves as a vehicle through which the business is...

We study the endogenous determination of corporate debt maturity in a setting with default risk. We assume that firms must access the bond market and they issue debt with a flexible structure (coupon, face value, and maturity). Initially, the firm is in a low growth/illiquid state that requires...

I use the 2007-2008 financial crisis to gauge how internal financial resources and external financial constraints mitigate or worsen the impact of the crisis on default risk of US industrial firms. I identify heterogeneity in short-term funding needs at the onset of the crisis by exploiting...

The paper investigates the relationship between corporate hedging and product market competition. Using a broad sample of multiple commodity-inputs industries over the period of 1994-2008, the paper examines whether an unfavorable commodity shock has a long term effect on unhedged firms. I find...

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...