Recently fixed pricing and auctions have been brought together in a new pricing format that offers bidders the option of prematurely ending an auction at a fixed price. eBay calls this a “Buy-it- Now” auction, uBid calls this “UBuy it” and Yahoo auctions refer to this as a “Buy Now”....

This dissertation contains three essays concerning two broad areas, namely, optimal capital structure and risky assets modeling. In the first paper, we study corporate debt values, capital structure, and the term structure of interest rates in a unified framework. We employ numerical techniques...