Modern financial markets offer the real world's best approximation to the idealized price auction market envisioned in economic theory. Nevertheless, as the increasingly exquisite and detailed financial data demonstrate, financial markets often fail to behave as they should if trading were truly...

Asset Pricing, Default Risk. - The central question of this thesis is whether firm distress risk explains stock returns. This question is important because it has been suspected that distress risk might reconcile a growing evidence on patterns in returns, which are otherwise hard to explain,...