With high coupon rates, unsecured personal loans promise attractive returns to investors. However, investors also bear the risk of complete loss in the event of default. In our experience, the most successful investors rely on a deep understanding of the product and the nuances in its...

We examine changes in debt structure when firms experience financial distress. At these points in time, firms refinance and undergo substantial changes in priority structure. Specifically, we find that firms di- versify their priority structure relative to its pre-distress composition. We show,...

Firms face a ceaseless dilemma of adaptation to their environments by embracing the right combination of exploration/exploitation strategies. Regarding this quandary’s long-term impact, we propose a novel theoretical model linking the pursuit of exploration and exploitation approaches and the...

The evolution of firms is not necessarily uniform. Exploring how this affects credit risk models, we find that firm life cycle provides additional explanatory power not captured by age. Firm age has an ambiguous effect on default risk and its impact during periods of high volatility is...

The optimal investment-dividend policy of a financially constrained firm whose earnings are subject to additive shocks is shown to exhibit several stylized economic and financial features of the firm life cycle which usually require considerably more complex models. This parsimonious model...

Small firms are an important source of income for the poor in developing countries, and the target of many interventions designed to help them grow. But there is no systematic information on the failure or death of such firms. The paper puts together 16 panel surveys from 12 different developing...

We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life cycles and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms’ balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business...

The influence of market sentiments on the bankruptcy risk propensity of firms has been extensively explored in the literature. However, less attention has been paid to whether the corporate life cycle plays any role in this nexus. The purpose of this research is to unveil how the corporate...