On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

We investigate the impact of banking competition on corporate credit risk. Although banking competition does not, on average, affect corporate bankruptcy rates, we find that it causes corporate bankruptcies to increase significantly for high-leverage firms. This effect lasts up to eight years...

In this paper, we ask how firms’ optimal debt structure responds to a change in the bankruptcy regime. While existing work shows that this relationship is dependent on the ex-ante liquidation value of a firm, we demonstrate that the ownership of lenders they are connected to also matters. We...

One of the elements of company’s evaluation is ratio analysis. It includes computation of bankruptcy risk metrics. There are multiple such measures, of which two seem to be quite universal and commonly applied. These are current ratio and indebtedness ratio. In this study, the accuracy of...

We provide updates to and perspectives on the enduring topic of debt and taxes. The recent decade brought us new empirical strategies, accounting rules, and tax laws. We discuss how these and other developments change our understanding of leverage and taxes. Overall, tax incentives still do not...

This paper attempts to assist fellow leveraged buyout researchers understand nuanced details of corporate finance and leveraged buyouts, in particular. Given Haque, Jang, and Mayer (2022) is produced by esteemed colleagues at prestigious intuitions (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve...

This study provides new stylized facts on the determinants of corporate failure and acquisition in Germany. It also offers important lessons for the design of empirical studies. We show that firms experiencing failure or acquisition are significantly different from surviving firms on a number of...

This paper develops a new model of debt renegotiation in a structural framework, that accounts for both taxes and bankruptcy costs. We investigate situations where the manager can optimally (on behalf of the equity holder) impose a permanent coupon reduction to creditors, given that the new...

This article investigates the impact of the observation that managers can use cash to defer bankruptcy on default risk and corporate financial policies. I show that with managerial cash use to defer default, the impact of cash on default risk depends on two opposing channels. While cash provides...