This paper studies the effects of making corporate sector assets eligible as collateral for central bank borrowing. Banks are willing to pay collateral premia on assets if they become eligible as collateral. Collateral premia make debt financing cheaper for eligible firms, which respond by...

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...

We show that U.S. banks do not engage in zombie lending to firms of deteriorating profitability, irrespective of capital levels and exposure to such firms. In contrast, unregulated financial intermediaries do, originating more and cheaper loans to these firms. We establish these results using...

There have been 128 defaults among U.S. CDS reference entities between 2001 and 2020. Within this sample, the five-year CDS spread is a significant predictor of corporate default in models with equity market covariates and firm attributes. This finding holds for forecast horizons up to 12...

The quantitative analyses related to firms’ default prediction extensively analyzed which balance sheet ratios include significant information on the probability of default of a firm. These analyses are typically aimed at measuring a generic default risk, while no analyses are aimed at...

Many firms choose to refinance their debt. We investigate the long run effects of this extended practice on credit ratings and credit spreads. We find that debt refinancing generates systematic rating downgrades unless a minimum firm value growth is observed. Deviations from this growth path...

We develop a theoretical model quantifying how firm-level pandemic exposure and sentiment, as informational shocks, affect a firm’s credit spread and default risk. Consistent with model predictions, we find significantly positive impacts on single-name credit default swap (CDS) spreads from...

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...

In this paper, we compare different methods for computing default probabilities using a sample of banks that experienced financial distress during the 2007–2009 global financial crisis. The traditional KMV-Merton model for firm valuation, credit ratings by rating agencies and a recently...

This paper examines the performance of two commonly applied bankruptcy prediction models, the accounting ratio-based Altman Z-Score model, and the structural Distance to Default model which currently underlies Morningstar's Financial Health Grade for public companies (Morningstar 2008)....