Fama and French (1992) suggest that the positive value premium results from risk of financial distress. However, recent empirical research has found that financially distressed firms have lower stock returns, using empirical estimates of default probabilities. This paper reconciles the positive...

In this paper, we use accounting fundamentals to measure systematic risk of distress. Our main testable prediction—that this risk increases with the probability of recessionary failure, P(R|F)—is based on a stylized model that guides our empirical analyses. We first apply the lasso method to...

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...

This paper provides an alternative approach to the structural credit risk models. The first-passage-time approach extends the original Merton (Journal of Finance 29, 449-470) model by accounting for the fact that the default may occur not only at the debt's maturity, but also prior to this date....

We develop a structural equilibrium model with business cycles and use it to examine the economic implications of voluntary filing for bankruptcy. We find that conflict of interests that arises from the voluntary filing option of Chapter 11 causes higher ex-ante losses in firm value in...

Fama and French (1992) suggest that the positive value premium results from financial distress risk. However, recent empirical research finds that financially distressed firms have lower stock returns, by using empirical estimates of default probabilities. This paper reconciles the positive...

The distress puzzle refers to the empirical regularity that firms with high measures of default likelihood earn anomalously low returns, despite having relatively high CAPM betas. This paper shows it is possible to qualitatively explain this anomaly using a consumption-based asset pricing model...

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...

The problem of the firm bankruptcy prediction was investigated by foreign researchers in the 1930s and it still remains relevant. Since publishing of the major Altman's work (1968), based on multiple discriminant analysis, this methodological area has been considerably changed. Taking into...

The problem of the firm bankruptcy prediction was investigated by foreign researchers in the 1930s and it still remains relevant. Since publishing of the major Altman's work (1968), based on multiple discriminant analysis, this methodological area has been considerably changed. Taking into...