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...

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...

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...

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 document the negative effect of stock liquidity on default risk for a sample of 46 countries. We further find that default risk declines following the introduction of the Directive on Markets in Financial Instruments (MiFID)—an exogenous shock that increases liquidity. The effect of...

This paper quantifies the premium demanded by the investors for bearing the corporate default risk. We propose a novel approach that exploits the information in both credit default swap (CDS) spreads and stock prices, using the pricing restrictions provided by a structural model of credit risk....

We build a dynamic model to link two empirical patterns:\ the negative failure probability-return relation (Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi, 2008) and the positive distress risk premium-return relation (Friewald, Wagner, and Zechner, 2014). We show analytically and quantitatively that (i)...