Is inflation 'always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon' or is it fundamentally a fiscal phenomenon? The answer hinges crucially on the underlying monetary-fiscal policy regime. Because different regimes imply completely different mechanisms for price level determination and therefore starkly...

The presence of strategic customers may force an already financially distressed firm into a death spiral: Sensing the firm's financial difficulty, customers may wait strategically for deep discounts in liquidation sales. In turn, such waiting lowers the firm's profitability and increases the...

In this paper, we develop a structural model that captures the interaction between the cash balance and investment opportunities for a rm that already has some debt outstanding. We consider a rm whose assets produce a stochastic cash flow stream. The fi rm has an opportunity to expand its...

In 2002, a legal reform introduced in India allowed secured creditors to seize and liquidate the defaulter's assets. We study firms' choice between capital and labor in response to these strengthened creditor rights by exploiting variation in their pre-policy proportion of collateralizable...

Market liquidity is informative of future corporate defaults but in a nuanced way. A firm's probability of default increases with market illiquidity only when the firm's funding liquidity is tight and/or solvency position is weak. Such relationship persists after controlling for a variety of...

The law of preferential transfers permits the trustee of a bankruptcy estate to avoid transfers made by the debtor to a creditor on account of a prior debt in the 90 days leading up to the bankruptcy proceeding. The standard for avoiding these preferential transfers is one of strict liability,...

The paper differs from current literature by providing a systematic analysis of the relationship between sovereign debt, financial distress and political career concerns via a novel game-theoretic model, in order to analyze the strategic behavior of governments in revealing financial distress...

Our study examines whether financial distress risk is systematic risk using twelve portfolios sorted by size, book-to-market, and leverage and a portfolio of distressed firms covering an 18-year period. It also tests the explanatory power of the risk factors that best capture default risk. The...