There is a wide body of literature in corporate finance that examines the tradeoffs between liquidation and re-organization for creditors in financially distressed firms (Kahl (2002), Hotchkiss (1995), Gertner and Scharfstein (1991)). We incorporate salient elements from this literature into a...

There is a link between barrier options and tax shields of interest expense. We combine this link with a traditional valuation approach, to present practical valuation formulas for interest tax shields in three debt scenarios with risk of default: (1) constant debt, (2) delayed debt, and (3)...

This paper proposes a simple scheme for static hedging of defaultable contingent claims. It is a kind of generalization of the technique developed by Carr and Chou (1997), Carr and Madan (1998), and Takahashi and Yamazaki (2009a) into unified credit-equity modelings. Our scheme provides a...

We develop a mathematical proof demonstrating that only financially-strong firms will sell put options on their own stock, but financially-weak firms will not. The sale of options on a company's own stock exposes the buyer to default risk of the issuer, which additionally complicates the payoff...

Based on the works of Brockman and Turtle (2003) and Giesecke (2004), we propose in this study a hybrid barrier option model to explain observed credit spreads. It is free of problems with the structural model which underprescribed credit spreads for investment grade corporate bonds and...

Upstream producers that possess market power, sell forwards with a lengthy duration to regional electricity companies (REC). As part of the liberalization of the electricity market, RECs have been privatized and exposed to a possible bankruptcy threat if spot prices have fallen below their...

This is the first study on the risk-neutral distribution of option returns. We derive solutions for the risk-neutral variance, skewness, and kurtosis of call and put option returns and document several properties of these ex-ante moments. We find that the volatility, skewness, and kurtosis of...

The value premium is the empirical observation that low market/book “value” stocks have higher returns than high market/book “growth” stocks. In this paper, we investigate and present evidence for an “equity as a call option hypothesis” for the value premium. Volatility decreases the...

Scholars and policymakers now debate reforms that would prevent a bankruptcy filing from being a moment that forces valuation of the firm, crystallization of claims against it, and elimination of junior stakeholders' interest in future appreciation in firm value. These reforms have many names,...

Prior evidence on pre-bankruptcy filing informed trading is mixed. The inconclusive findings might result from the sole focus on stock trading. We reassess the presence of pre-filing informed and insider trades by examining the information content of options trading before bankruptcy...