This paper examines optimal two-period financial contracts between firms in a product market on the one side and banks as creditors on the other side. Similar to the Bolton-Scharfstein contracts, banks can mitigate the moral hazard problem of truthfully revealing the ex ante unknown profits of...

This paper addresses two issues encountered in the empirical financial distress literature: a-theoretical treatment of leverage and product-market competition as predictors of financial distress hazard; and lack of attention to frailty as a potential source of bias in reported estimates. We...