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...

In this paper, we use accounting fundamentals to measure systematic risk of distress. Our main testable prediction—that this risk increases with the probability of recessionary failure, P(R|F)—is based on a stylized model that guides our empirical analyses. We first apply the lasso method to...

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...

Fama and French (1992) suggest that the positive value premium results from risk of financial distress. However, recent empirical research has found that financially distressed firms have lower stock returns, using empirical estimates of default probabilities. This paper reconciles the positive...

This paper quantifies the premium demanded by the investors for bearing the corporate default risk. We propose a novel approach that exploits the information in both credit default swap (CDS) spreads and stock prices, using the pricing restrictions provided by a structural model of credit risk....

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 presents a new model for valuing a credit default swap (CDS) contract that is affected by multiple credit risks of the buyer, seller and reference entity. We show that default dependency has a significant impact on asset pricing. In fact, correlated default risk is one of the most...