The introduction of deal types for issues of seasoned equity in which the offer follows quickly after the announcement highlights the role of underwriter certification in the performance of SEOs. Controlling for the matching between underwriters and issuing firms, we find that the quality of the...

We derive a model of bond pricing under ambiguity, showing that ambiguity interacts with risk to determine spreads. Since default is an inherently "unfavorable" outcome, ambiguity-averse bondholders overweigh its probability and demand higher yields for bonds with higher ambiguity.Empirically,...

Moral hazard and asymmetric information have both been proposed as the motive behind the use of IPO lockup provisions, with each receiving empirical support in the literature. Rather than consider them to be mutually exclusive motivations, we hypothesize that each is dominant for a different set...

The Modigliani and Miller propositions on the irrelevancy of capital structure and dividends are shown to be valid in a large class of models with asymmetric information. The main assumption is that managerial compensation is chosen optimally. This differs from most recent papers on this topic,...

We derive equilibrium bidding strategies in divisible good auctions for asymmetrically informed risk neutral and risk averse bidders when there is random noncompetitive demand. The equilibrium bid schedules contain both strategic considerations and explicit allowances for the winner's curse....

In an incomplete contracting environment, bankruptcy is considered to be a renegotiation of the firm's financial contracts. An optimal bankruptcy law is derived as optimal restrictions on the environment within which the claimants to a distressed firm bargain. The law is used as a commitment...

We examine the impact of explicitly incorporating a measure of debt capacity in recent tests of competing theories of capital structure. Our main results are that if external funds are required, in the absence of debt capacity concerns, debt appears to be preferred to equity. Concerns over debt...