Our objective is to test for evidence of information asymmetry in the mortgage servicing market. Does the sale of mortgage servicing rights (MSR) by the initial lender to a second servicing institution unveil any residual asymmetric information? We are the first to analyze the originator's...

This study is motivated by the continuing popularity of the Altman Z-score as a measure of distress risk. Altman first introduced the ‘Z' score in 1968 and 50 years later it is still going strong as a means to predicting bankruptcy. During these 50 years, academicians have studied the...

Managerial compensation theory proposes that both equity- and debt-type compensation should be included in the optimal compensation contract in order to align managers' interests with those of both shareholders and debtholders of the firm. However, this reasoning also suggests that the two forms...

We analyze the question whether and when access to refinancing via repurchase agreements as opposed to asset liquidation increases efficiency to financial intermediators ('banks'). By pledging assets in form of a repo contract the bank can raise cash, by this preventing to forgo returns on sold...

This study jointly evaluates the effects of the U.S. Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Federal Reserve's Discount Window (DW) and Term Auction Facility (TAF) on bank syndicated lending during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, using a unique data set that tracks the exposure of...

We employ a unique data set that tracks the changes of each lender's share commitment in each syndicated credit facility in each year to study the relationship between credit cuts and the borrowing firms' future performance. Overcoming the crucial data limitations in prior empirical studies of...

This study examines whether negative book equity (BE) firms are in financial distress by analyzing their operating performance, financial characteristics, distress risk, and survivability when they first report negative BE. Firms with small magnitude of negative BE (SNBE firms) suffer from...

We show that tests of market efficiency are sensitive to the inclusion of delisting firm-years. When included, trading strategy returns based on anomaly variables can increase (for strategies based on earnings, cash flows and the book-to-market ratio) or decrease (for a strategy based on...

Standard credit risk models cannot explain the observed clustering of default, sometimes described as quot;credit contagion.quot; This paper provides the first empirical analysis of credit contagion via direct counterparty effects. We find that bankruptcy announcements cause negative abnormal...