Using a large sample of business groups from more than one hundred countries around the world, we show that group information matters for parent and subsidiary default prediction. Group firms may support each other when in financial distress. Potential group support represents an off-balance...

We investigate the informational content of credit default swap (CDS) spreads for future volatility of (firm) assets and equity. In the cross-section, CDS spreads are significantly more informative about future asset than equity volatility. The informational content of historical and option...

In recent years, a number of papers have established a new empirical regularity. Stocks of distressed firms vastly underperform those of financially healthy firms. It is not necessary to attribute the negative excess returns of distressed firms to inefficient or irrational markets. We show that...

We find that a firm's stock price reaction to its credit rating downgrade announcement is muted by 44--52% when credit default swaps (CDSs) trade on its debt. We explore the role of the CDS markets in providing information ex ante and relieving financing frictions ex post for downgraded firms....

This paper examines the impact of stock liquidity on firm bankruptcy risk. Using the Securities and Exchange Commission decimalization regulation as a shock to stock liquidity, we establish that enhanced liquidity decreases default risk. Stocks with the highest default risk experience the...

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...

Standard credit risk models cannot explain the observed clustering of default, sometimes described as "credit contagion." This paper provides the first empirical analysis of credit contagion via direct counterparty effects. We examine the wealth effects of bankruptcy announcements on creditors...

In this paper, we intend to explain an empirical finding that distressed stocks delivered anomalously low returns (Campbell et. al. (2008)). We show that in a model where investors have heterogeneous preferences, the expected return of risky assets depends on idiosyncratic coskewness betas,...

We document the negative effect of stock liquidity on default risk for a sample of 46 countries. We further find that default risk declines following the introduction of the Directive on Markets in Financial Instruments (MiFID)—an exogenous shock that increases liquidity. The effect of...

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...