Private debt contracts tend to have covenants that restrict future investment, restrict capital structure decisions, or impose thresholds for cash flows or other performance measures. While previous studies have demonstrated a relationship between firm characteristics and the overall strictness...

We study the prices of a firm's debt and equity in a market where investors have private information and may exhibit differences of opinion. We show how debt and equity valuations, and the impact of public information and distress risk on these valuations, depend upon disagreement and the...

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...

This paper develops a tractable general equilibrium with endogenous firm capital structure decisions driven by changes in economic uncertainty. The model enables a critical assessment of standard paradigms of corporate finance in order to highlight empirically important directions for...

This article challenges Modigliani & Miller's (M&M) Famous Homemade Leverage Proof. The M&M proof suggests that since in efficient markets any value impact from leverage results in a homemade arbitrage opportunity, leverage must be value neutral. However, through the uncontroversial notion of...

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...