I build a dynamic capital structure model that demonstrates how business-cycle variations in expected growth rates, economic uncertainty, and risk premia influence firms' financing and default policies. Countercyclical fluctuations in risk prices, default probabilities, and default losses arise...

The empirical tests of traditional structural models of credit risk tend to indicate that such models have been unsuccessful in the modeling of credit spreads. To address these negative findings some authors introduce single-factor stochastic volatility specifications and/or jumps.In the yield...

We generalize the asset dynamics assumptions of Leland (1994b) and Leland and Toft (1996) to a much richer class of models. By assuming a stationary corporate debt structure with constant principal, coupon payment and average maturity through continuous retirement and refinancing as long as the...

We present an integrated framework incorporating both exogenous liquidity risk in the secondary corporate bond market and volatility risk in the dynamics of asset value in debt rollover models. Using an innovative theoretical approach we derive general expressions for the debt and equity values...

While empirical literature has documented a negative relation between default risk and stock returns, the theory suggests that default risk should be positively priced. We provide an explanation for this "default anomaly", by calculating monthly probabilities of default (PDs) for a large sample...

Changes in collateralization have been implicated in significant default (or near-default) events during the financial crisis, most notably with AIG. We have developed a framework for quantifying this effect based on moving between Merton-type and Black-Cox-type structural default models. Our...

We propose a tractable model of a firm's dynamic debt and equity issuance policies in the presence of asymmetric information. Because "investment-grade" firms can access debt markets, managers who observe a bad private signal can both conceal this information and shield shareholders from...

I empirically decompose sovereign credit spreads into a default-risk component and its associated (credit) risk premium and study the effect of political uncertainty on them. On average, credit risk premia account for 42 percent of the observed spreads in the European sovereign credit market. I...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

Asset Pricing, Default Risk. - The central question of this thesis is whether firm distress risk explains stock returns. This question is important because it has been suspected that distress risk might reconcile a growing evidence on patterns in returns, which are otherwise hard to explain,...