U.S. nonfinancial business debt increased substantially in recent years in both absolute and relative terms and is now near its record high. Figure 1 shows that most of this increase was due to significant growth in investment-grade (IG) corporate bonds and institutional leveraged loans, while...

We document a negative (positive) relationship between firm performance and changes in the ownership of large (small) institutional investors. Small investors "exit'' while blockholders increase their holdings following poor performance. We find evidence that large investors increase ownership...

We study optimal capital structure by first estimating firm-specific cost and benefit functions for debt. The benefit functions are downward sloping reflecting that the incremental value of debt declines as more debt is used. The cost functions are upward sloping, reflecting the rising costs...

We study the generalized composite pure and randomized hypothesis testing problems. In addition to characterizing the optimal tests, we examine the conditions under which these two hypothesis testing problems are equivalent, and provide counterexamples when they are not. This analysis is useful...

Despite substantial debt relief to HIPC Initiative completion point countries, long-term debt sustainability remains a challenge. This paper examines a number of structural factors affecting external debt sustainability. It shows that in HIPC completion point countries (i) the export base...

We estimate firm-specific marginal cost of debt functions for a large panel of companies between 1980 and 2007. The marginal cost curves are identified by exogenous variation in the marginal tax benefits of debt. The location of a given company's cost of debt function varies with characteristics...

Generalized eigenvalue problem (GEP) plays a significant role in signal processing and machine learning. This paper proposes a consensus-based distributed algorithm for GEP in multi-agent systems, where data samples are distributively stored across agents. The distributed GEP is reformulated as...