A corporate bond market is thought to play an important role as a supplement to bank-oriented financial systems in emerging markets – functioning in effect as a “spare tire.” Yet bond markets typically rely upon a formal institutional foundation that is often lacking in developing...

Using political corruption conviction data from the U.S. Department of Justice, we examine the impact of local corruption on firms’ debt maturity structure while exploring both demand-side and supply-side explanations. Our results support the demand-side story and indicate that firms located...

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...

In response to the economic crisis of 2008 and the debt crises of some Eurozone countries, central banks began expansionary monetary policies, which became a massive injection of resources through the purchase of assets known as Quantitative Easing. The European Central Bank (ECB) took a step...

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...

Commodity producing corporations have trillions of dollars in outstanding debt. In that context, the bust in commodity prices has raised concerns about the sustainability of this debt and its systemic impacts. But so far the literature lacks estimates of how sensitive is this corporate debt to...

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...

The influence of rating announcements on corporate debt market trading has been previously overlooked. Based on an event study, we examine the effects of the three types of announcements provided by credit rating agencies on abnormal trading volume and trading frequency in the Spanish corporate...