We build a dynamic model to link two empirical patterns:\ the negative failure probability-return relation (Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi, 2008) and the positive distress risk premium-return relation (Friewald, Wagner, and Zechner, 2014). We show analytically and quantitatively that (i)...

We propose a tractable model of a firm's dynamic debt and equity issuance policies in the presence of asymmetric information. Because "investment-grade" firms can access debt markets, managers who observe a bad private signal can both conceal this information and shield shareholders from...

We develop an asset-pricing model with endogenous corporate policies that explains how inflation jointly impacts real asset prices and corporate default risk. Our model includes two empirically grounded nominal frictions: fixed nominal coupons and sticky profitability. Taken together, these two...

We offer a model and evidence that private debtholders play a key role in setting the endogenous asset value threshold below which corporations declare bankruptcy. The model, in the spirit of Black and Cox (1976), implies that the recovery rate at emergence from bankruptcy on all of the firm's...

This study uses 469,816 monthly observations of US public firms for the period 1990-2018 to document a strong positive relationship between short-term changes in financial distress risk and future stock price crashes. This result is economically significant as a one interquartile increase of the...

We discuss a simple, exactly solvable model of stochastic stock dynamics that incorporates regime switching between healthy and distressed regimes. Using this model, which is analytically tractable, we discuss a way of extracting expected returns for stocks from realized CDS spreads,...

This article develops a continuous-time asset pricing model for valuing corporate securities in the presence of secured and unsecured debt. We consider a framework where creditors dominate the renegotiation process. We show that the unsecured creditors are incentivized to liquidate the firm...

In this paper, we revisit a frequently employed simplification within the WACC approach that company cost of capital kV is supposed to be invariant to the debt ratio and therefore equal to the unlevered cost kU . Even though we know from Miles and Ezzell (1980) that kV formally differs from kU ,...

We propose an explanation for default contagion based on a Lucas model with two independent debt-financed trees. The transmission mechanism is that variations in the size of one tree impact the level of risk premium and the default decision for all borrowers. If a negative shock hits one tree,...

The article is about financial risk in micro, small and medium companies. The author presents empirical research connected with the degree of financial leverage and positive and negative effects of financial leverage in micro, small and medium companies and proofs that financial risk in micro...