Numerous studies have examined the effect on credit spreads of renegotiation. These studies have generally focussed on the impact on spread levels in general, and not on how renegotiation influences the relative pricing of senior versus junior debt claims. In this paper, we show that the scope...

Based on the ZHAW Managers Survey (7-13 April 2020) we evaluate firm reactions towards the COVID-19 crisis. We find that the Swiss economic lockdown measures successfully froze the economy, i.e., firms show very little pro-active reactions towards the crisis, but drastically decrease their...

When the debt of firms in distress is dispersed, a restructuring agreement is difficult to reach because of free riding. We develop a repeated game in which banks come across each other frequently, allowing them to threaten a punishment in case of free riding. As the number of lending banks...

Productivity growth is slowing down among OECD countries, coupled with increased misallocation of resources. A recent strand of literature focuses on the role of non-viable firms (“zombie firms”) to explain these developments. Using a rich firm-level dataset for one of the OECD countries...

This paper provides new evidence on the roles and strategies adopted by different types of debtor-in-possession (DIP) lenders: “loan-to-loan” (LTL) lenders — prepetition secured bank lenders providing DIP financing, and “loan-to-own” (LTO) lenders — activist investors (i.e., hedge...

Using a manually collected proprietary dataset, we study the spillover effects of liquidation versus reorganization. For identification, we leverage the random assignment of bankruptcy filings to administrators, which generate plausibly exogenous differences in liquidation probability. We find...

Using an extensive new data set on corporate bond defaults in the U.S. from 1866 to 2010, we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises. During the past 150 years, the U.S. has experienced many severe corporate default crises...

While credit is essential for investment, innovation and economic growth, there are risks related to excessive indebtedness in the corporate sector in the form of increased likelihood of financial distress and bankruptcy. The recent global crisis has highlighted the macroeconomic risks of credit...

We present novel empirical evidence on the use of off-balance sheet financing by publicly traded, U.S. non-financial firms. We find that about 5 percent of non-financial firms reported using a special purpose financing vehicle (SPV) to finance receivables in 2006. At the origination of the...

Default probability plays a central role in the static tradeoff theory of capital structure. We directly test this theory by regressing the probability of default on proxies for costs and benefits of debt. Contrary to predictions of the theory, firms with higher bankruptcy costs, i.e., smaller...