We find that firms with a larger proportion of short-term debt have lower future stock price crash risk, consistent with short-term debt lenders playing an effective monitoring role in constraining managers' bad-news-hoarding behavior. The inverse relation between short-maturity debt and future...

Debt pricing models typically ignore the bankruptcy process by specifying recovery rates as an exogenous function of the state space. I develop a parsimonious model in which corporate default induces a transfer of bond ownership away from traditional diversified holders toward risk-averse...

This article empirically shows that the cost of new debt is higher for firms that commit covenant violations. Using a proxy for product market competition to capture exogenous changes to a firm's competitive environment, I find that the cost is systematically higher for firms that operate in...

We present the puzzling evidence that, from 1962 to 2009, an average 10.2% of large public nonfinancial US firms have zero debt and almost 22% have less than 5% book leverage ratio. Zero-leverage behavior is a persistent phenomenon. Dividend-paying zero-leverage firms pay substantially higher...

This paper investigates whether firm managers time debt issuances according to market liquidity conditions. Using transactions data in the U.S. market from July 2002 to December 2009, our results show that both the moment and volume of debt issuance are significantly associated with periods of...

The Paris Agreement signals increased climate awareness and potential changes in the business environment as an economy decarbonizes. Ratification of the Paris Agreement could heighten climate-related transition risks, especially for companies in high-emitting industries. This research analyzes...

We are concerned with the valuation of the finite horizon corporate debt under Chapter 11 of the U.S. bankruptcy code. Broadie and Kaya (2007) set up a binomial model by assuming that determining the bankruptcy boundary is restricted to be at initial time. We distinguish the so-called bankruptcy...

This paper develops a model with the novel feature that firms can renegotiate debt both in and outside distress. We show that this feature is crucial for debt renegotiation models to explain corporate policies and debt prices. Specifically, the model reflects empirical credit spread patterns,...

We develop an equilibrium model of the debt maturity choice of firms, in the presence of fixed issuance costs in the primary debt market, and search frictions in the secondary debt market. Liquidity in the secondary market is related to the ratio of buyers to sellers, which is determined in...

The current U.S. tax code's loss carry provisions provide implicit tax subsidies to financially troubled firms. Since shareholders ultimately decide when to announce bankruptcy, such tax subsidies can incentivize them to strategically postpone default. Therefore, corporate taxation can influence...