On September 17, 2009, Boston Private Financial Holdings (BPFH) sold its Coral Gables, Florida based Gibraltar Private Bank & Trust subsidiary for $93 million. On October 27, 2009, Scott Rothstein fled to Morocco on a private jet before turning himself in to authorities. Mr. Rothstein has...

This LLM research project analyses four topics from the work of derivatives and structured products lawyers. The first topic is the interpretation of standard industry documentation, taking the example of Market Quotation and Loss definitions in 1992 ISDA Master Agreement. The second topic is...

The first wave of highly leveraged transactions (HLTs) also known as leveraged buyouts (LBOs) began in the late 1980s. Fewer transactions occurred in the 1990's after a number of companies in the first wave failed when the economy slowed down. More recently, the driving force behind levered...

I formulate a general model of fire sales in which multiple heterogeneous investors, each investing in multiple assets, become forced sellers due to exogenous price shocks. Simultaneously prices endogenously adjust based on the volume of forced sales. This induces strategic interaction between...

This article extends the continuous time framework of the firm developed by Black, Scholes, and Merton to analyze effects of private benefits. We highlight first how straight private benefits can lower stakeholders' wealth. We nevertheless point out that private benefits do not necessarily mean...

We develop a mathematical proof demonstrating that only financially-strong firms will sell put options on their own stock, but financially-weak firms will not. The sale of options on a company's own stock exposes the buyer to default risk of the issuer, which additionally complicates the payoff...

In this paper, we compare different methods for computing default probabilities using a sample of banks that experienced financial distress during the 2007–2009 global financial crisis. The traditional KMV-Merton model for firm valuation, credit ratings by rating agencies and a recently...

The purpose of this paper is to find out if firms that operate with debt free balance sheet are rewarded more by the investors at large. For this we form portfolios of debt free firms and compare their performance with performance of matching portfolios of leveraged firms from the same industry...