Informational constraints may turn the Merton Model for corporate credit risk impractical. Applying this framework to the Colombian financial sector is limited to four stock-market-listed firms; more than a hundred banking and non-banking firms are not listed.Within the same framework, firms'...

We exploit the natural institutional variation in Western Europe to examine leverage (and debt maturity) for listed and non-listed companies (NLCs). We find that the legal efficiency measure (Djankov, et al, 2008) is more closely related to the amount of leverage and debt maturity than is the...

This paper examines the effect of ownership structure of a controlling shareholder on the financial constraints of non-financial firms in 22 economies for the 1982-2009 period. We find that the overinvestment propensity of a controlling shareholder becomes less severe with an increase in...

'Cash is king' and, presumably, will remain king for a long time to come. This is even more relevant since the financial crisis. Banks are now hesitant to provide credit lines to companies, whether national or cross-border. High interest rates are charged on debit amounts, but hardly any...

Over the last decade, the availability of credit default swaps (CDS) has dramatically transformed the markets for credit insurance by providing participants efficient avenues through which to share credit risks. These risk-sharing benefits notwithstanding, the growth of credit default swaps...

The purpose of this paper is to find out if firms that operate with debt free balance sheet are rewarded more by the investors at large. For this we form portfolios of debt free firms and compare their performance with performance of matching portfolios of leveraged firms from the same industry...

Leo Breiman (Breiman et al., 1984, 1998) was a statistician who was fond of practical applications, and this led him to develop several original studies. Based on the work begun by Friedman (1977), he developed a very accurate classification system, without the need for statistical assumptions,...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced — or has failed to influence — federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH...

The problem of the firm bankruptcy prediction was investigated by foreign researchers in the 1930s and it still remains relevant. Since publishing of the major Altman's work (1968), based on multiple discriminant analysis, this methodological area has been considerably changed. Taking into...