This study identifies the factors affecting the ratings assigned to Canadian firms by the rating agency Standard and Poor's, and proposes a multinomial logit model to predict ratings. We first propose a two-class model which classifies ratings as either investment or speculative grade. We then...

We examine the relation between venture capital (VC) investments, M&A activity, and merger competition laws in 48 countries around the world. We find evidence of a strong positive association between VC investments and lagged M&A activity, consistent with the hypothesis that an active M&A market...

Two models of default risk are prominent in the financial literature: Merton's structural model and Altman's reduced-form model. The former has the benefit of being responsive, since the probabilities of default can continually be updated with the evolution of firms' asset values. Its main flaw...

Market leverage is one of the main determinants for defining the optimal capital structure of the firm, and has a significant impact on several variables that affect the design of the firm's business strategy. This paper is focussed on the potential methodologies exploitable to obtain reliable...

Inspired by Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009), we propose risk-neutral options' implied measures of riskiness and investigate their significance in predicting the cross section of expected returns per unit of risk. The empirical analyses indicate a negative and significant...

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 study the exposure of the U.S. corporate bond returns to liquidity shocks of stocks and treasury bonds over the period 1973-2007 in a regime switching model. In one regime, liquidity shocks have mostly insignificant effect on bond prices, whereas in another regime, a rise in illiquidity...

We document several facts about corporate debt maturity: (1) debt maturity is pro-cyclical; (2) higher-beta firms tend to have longer debt maturity; (3) shorter maturity amplifies the sensitivity of credit spreads to aggregate shocks. We build a dynamic capital structure model that explains...

In this paper, we revisit a frequently employed simplification within the WACC approach that company cost of capital kV is supposed to be invariant to the debt ratio and therefore equal to the unlevered cost kU . Even though we know from Miles and Ezzell (1980) that kV formally differs from kU ,...

As the economy enters a phase transition into an aperiodic state, the tech industry finds itself at the brink of chaos. Inflated evaluations in private markets before IPOs and increasing Shannon entropy of post-IPO share prices reveal a market teetering on the edge. But is it a phase transition,...