We argue that the Merton (1974) model's relatively high ability to forecast bankruptcy stems from its ability to capture either the chance of net worth dropping below an externally-imposed threshold or of an economic insolvency. Using unique bankruptcy data from fifteen countries, our evidence...

In an equilibrium Black and Scholes (1973) economy, a firm's default risk and its expected equity return are non-monotonically related. This may explain the surprising relation found between these two variables in recent empirical research. Although changes in default risk induced by expected...

We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the rationales proposed in prior studies to explain several well-known characteristic anomalies. Recognizing that only a minority of firms drive these anomalies, we run a statistical leverage analysis to filter out these firms. We then try to forecast the...

Shareholders in distressed firms should profit from shifting to more risky assets, but there is little empirical evidence documenting such behavior. We find that this weak evidence is consistent with creditors being somewhat able to control the investment policies of distressed firms if distress...

Motivated by a central banker with a symmetric inflation zone target, we assume in this letter that the loss function of a policy maker can be approximated by the quartic form. For non-normal distributions, we show that such a loss function implies a systematic inflation bias even when the bank...

France's Ordonnance 2006-346 repudiated the notion of possessory ownership in the Napoleonic Code, easing the pledge of physical assets in a country where credit was highly concentrated. Using a differences-test strategy, we show that firms operating newly-pledgeable assets significantly...

Recent empirical studies show that statistical forecasts of a stock's return skewness negatively price stocks, apparently consistent with recent theoretical studies. While the theoretical studies, however, focus on skewness over long return horizons, the empirical studies focus on skewness over...