Government bailouts undermine the core principles of capitalism. They are also expensive, unjust, unpopular, and usually represent dramatic deviations from the rule of law. However, they are also, in some cases, necessary. The “problem of bailouts,” then, is that they are almost always...

Concerns have been raised, especially since the global financial crisis, about whether trading in credit default swaps (CDS) increases the credit risk of the reference entities. We use a unique, comprehensive sample covering 901 CDS introductions on North American corporate issuers between June...

We study a competitive model in which market incompleteness implies that debt-financed firms may default in some states of nature and default may lead to the sale of the firms' assets at fire sale prices when markets are illiquid. This incompleteness is the only friction in the model and the...

The first wave of highly leveraged transactions (HLTs) also known as leveraged buyouts (LBOs) began in the late 1980s. Fewer transactions occurred in the 1990's after a number of companies in the first wave failed when the economy slowed down. More recently, the driving force behind levered...

In the banking industry, the common practice to correlate default and migration events of various guarantors is to use correlated asset price returns. This approach, which is basically a copula approach, is used also by KMV's GCorr model and JPMorgan's CreditMetrics model. However, these models...

The events from the 2007–09 financial crisis have raised concerns that the failure of large financial institutions can lead to destabilizing fire sales of assets. The risk of fire sales is related to exemptions from bankruptcy's automatic stay provision enjoyed by a number of financial...

This Article fills a gap in commercial finance law. Despite the fact that “securitization” has become enormously important to capital markets — and is sometimes blamed for the credit crisis — we have no agreed understanding of the term. Various regulators and commentators have generated...

We describe a new framework for collateralized exposure modelling under an ISDA Master Agreement with a Credit Support Annex. The proposed model captures legal and operational aspects of default in considerably greater detail than models currently used by most practitioners, while remaining...

Our paper investigates spillover effects across different business segments of publicly traded financial conglomerates. We find that the investment decisions of mutual fund shareholders do not just depend on the prior performance of the mutual funds, they also depend on the prior performance of...

We consider the problem faced by an investor who must liquidate a given basket of assets over a finite time horizon. The investor's goal is to maximize the expected utility of the sales revenues over a class of adaptive strategies. We assume that the investor's utility has constant absolute risk...