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Previous studies targeting accuracy improvement of default models mainly focused on the choice of the explanatory variables and the statistical approach. We alter the focus to the choice of the dependent variable. We particularly explore whether the common practice (in literature) of using proxies for default events (bankruptcy or delisting) to increase sample size indeed improves accuracy. We examine four definitions of financial distress and show that each definition carries considerably different characteristics. We discover that rating agencies effort to measure correctly the timing of default is valuable. In predicting default and in explaining CDS spreads, a default model significantly outperforms any other type of financial-distress model, despite being estimated on a substantially smaller sample (72 defaults compared to 409 bankruptcies and 923 delistings).

The tax laws of most developed countries are debt biased since firms can deduct interest on debt but not on equity. This bias is known to distort investment decisions. However, less is known about how the debt tax shield affects the ownership of assets when bidders differ financial expertise and thus in optimal use of leverage. We show that the debt tax shield need not always distort ownership efficiency. Assets end up with the socially preferred owner when differences in financial and productive expertise between bidders are small and better financial expertise reduces expected bankruptcy costs.

This paper analyzes the decision of firms to sell assets to fund investments (financing asset sales). For a sample of U.S. manufacturing firms during the 1971-2010 period, we document new stylized facts about financing asset sales that cannot be explained by traditional motives for selling assets, such as financial distress or financing constraints. Using a structural model of financing, investment, and acroeconomic risk, we show that financing asset sales attenuate the debt overhang problem, because asset sale financed investments imply lower wealth transfers from equity to debt than otherwise identical but equity financed investments. This novel motive to reduce the debt overhang problem can explain how financing asset sales relate to firm characteristics and business cycles. We also confirm with simulated panels of model firms that are structurally similar to their empirical counterpart that they indeed feature the dynamic patterns of financing asset sales we observe in the data for real firms.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the aftermath of business failure (BF) by addressing: how the individual progressed and developed new ventures, how individuals changed business behaviors and practices in light of a failure, and what was the effect of previous failure on the individual’s decisions to embark on subsequent ventures. Design/methodology/approach The authors resort to qualitative methods to understand the aftermath of BF from a retrospective point of a successful entrepreneur. Specifically, the authors undertook semi-structured interviews to six entrepreneurs, three from the north of Europe and three from the south and use interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings The authors found that previous failure impacted individuals strongly, being shaped by the individual’s experience and age, and their perception of blame for the failure. An array of moderator costs was identified, ranging from antecedents to institutions that were present in the individual’s lives. The outcomes are directly relatable to the failed experience by the individual. The authors also found that the failure had a significant effect on the individual’s career path. Originality/value While predicting the failure of healthy firms or the discovery of the main determinants that lead to such an event have received increasingly more attention in the last two decades, the focus on the consequences of BF is still lagging behind. The present study fills this gap by analyzing the aftermath of BF.

The paper analyzes the welfare implications of a policy of mandatory disclosure of information on the value of directly held investments by banks. It is based on a model of payments in a network where the value of a bank’s equity depends on the value of directly held investment of its trading partners, i.e. there is “contagion”. Additionally banks have a profitable investment project for which they need funding from outsiders, but due to agency problems they can only obtain financing if their equity is large enough. Furthermore, banks can, at a cost, disclose the information of their directly held investments. We find that there are equilibrium with no disclosure and no funding for new investments projects. Yet when the disclosure costs are not too large, mandatory disclosure increases ex-ante welfare of banks and outside investors if and only if contagion is severe. The difference for the social and private benefits is that an individual bank’s disclosure of the value of its directly held investment can be uninformative due to counterparty default risk. Instead, mandatory disclosure of information by all banks allows outside investors to assess the financial architecture of the system and direct their funding to the solvent banks.

Countries become more politically polarized and fractionalized following financial crises, reducing the likelihood of major financial reforms precisely when they might have especially large benefits. The evidence from a large sample of countries provides strong support for the hypotheses that following a financial crisis, voters become more ideologically extreme and ruling coalitions become weaker, independently of whether they were initially in power. The evidence that increased polarization and weaker governments reduce the chances of financial reform and that financial crises lead to legislative gridlock and anemic reform is less clear-cut. The US debt overhang resolution is discussed as an illustration. (JEL D72, E32, E44, G01, H63)

This paper is intended to be as a blueprint for the state of regulation on insolvency proceedings in Romania regarding the entities’ activities and the overall impact on the economic environment. From the highlighted statistical analysis regarding the number of insolvencies registered in Romania but also in the European countries, there are drawn comparative conclusions which are meant to highlight the strengths and especially the weaknesses that still exist in the legal system regarding the entities’ insolvency in Romania. Although the reform of the insolvency in the legal system has been initiated since 2006, it is still in the process to harmonize with the European practices. One of the most recent areas constrained to harmonize and to reform is the administrative sector, the issue of creating the legal framework for the insolvency of the municipalities being discussed only in mid 2013. The paper also aims to highlight the similarities and differences between insolvency procedure applicable to the enterprises since 2006 and the insolvency procedure recently applicable to the municipalities in Romania. Regardless of the specifics of each procedure but both groups have a common goal, those to purify the Romanian economic and administrative environment.

Language plays a fundamental role in the fight against HIV and AIDS in Kenya. Moreover, language is important in the dissemination of information that would ensure the success of both prevention and treatment of any disease. English language is used as the main language of communication on HIV and AIDS related issues in Kenya. The documented information available in indigenous languages, for example, EkeGusii on HIV and AIDS is many at times a direct translation from English. Whereas Kenya has made significant progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS, the prevalence of HIV in Gusii is very high, at between 10% and 28%, this call for investigation. In a recent draft report, HIV Prevention Revolution Road MAP 2013, prepared by NACC and NASCOP revealed that Kisii is among the nine Counties that contribute more than half of the new HIV infections in the country. A number of linguistic expressions such as metaphors are used in reference to HIV and AIDS in EkeGusii. This article investigates the journey metaphor as used in EkeGusii HIV and AIDS discourse. The ubiquity nature of metaphor makes it possible for the journey metaphor to be abundant in EkeGusii HIV and AIDS discourse. This paper reveals how metaphor reflects and structures EkeGusii speakers understanding of reality and particularly HIV and AIDS. As a result, the basic metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY is elaborated in novel ways and expressed in diverse measures in EkeGusii. Consequently, EkeGusii speakers perceive a seropositive individual as a traveller on an endless journey of taking ARVs or death.

We investigate whether and how business credit information sharing helps to better assess the default risk of private firms. Private firms represent an ideal testing ground because they are smaller, more informationally opaque, riskier, and more dependent on trade credit and bank loans than public firms. Based on a representative panel dataset that comprises private firms from all major industries, we find that business credit information sharing substantially improves the quality of default predictions. The improvement is stronger for older firms and those with limited liability, and depends on the sharing of firms’ payment history and the number of firms covered by the local credit bureau office. The value of soft business credit information is higher the smaller the firms and the lower their distance from the local credit bureau office. Furthermore, in spatial and industry analyses we show that the higher the value of business credit information the lower the realized default rates. Our study highlights the channel through which business credit information sharing adds value and the factors that influence its strength.

Exploiting the timing of the 2005–2006 Italian bankruptcy law reforms, we disentangle the effects of reorganization and liquidation in bankruptcy on bank financing and firm investment. A 2005 reform introduces reorganization procedures facilitating loan renegotiation. The 2006 reform subsequently strengthens creditor rights in liquidation. The first reform increases interest rates and reduces investment. The second reform reduces interest rates and spurs investment. Our results highlight the importance of identifying the distinct effects of liquidation and reorganization, as these procedures differently address the tension in bankruptcy law between the continuation of viable businesses and the preservation of repayment incentives.

Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings should be "safer" and have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary motive for saving cash, which in our model causes riskier firms to accumulate higher cash reserves. In contrast, spreads are negatively related to the part of cash holdings that is not determined by credit risk factors. Similarly, although firms with higher cash reserves are less likely to default in the short term, endogenously determined liquidity may be related positively to the longer-term probability of default. Our empirical analysis confirms these predictions, suggesting that precautionary savings are central to understanding the effects of cash on credit risk. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.

Our model shows that deterioration in debt market liquidity leads to an increase in not only the liquidity premium of corporate bonds but also credit risk. The latter effect originates from firms’ debt rollover. When liquidity deterioration causes a firm to suffer losses in rolling over its maturing debt, equity holders bear the losses while maturing debtholdersare paidinfull.Thisconflictleadsthefirmto defaultatahigher fundamental threshold. Our model demonstrates an intricate interaction between the liquidity premium and default premium and highlights the role of short-term debt in exacerbating rollover risk. THE YIELD SPREAD OF a firm’s bond relative to the risk-free interest rate directly determines the firm’s debt financing cost, and is often referred to as its credit spread. It is widely recognized that the credit spread reflects not only a default premium determined by the firm’s credit risk but also a liquidity premium due to illiquidity of the secondary debt market (e.g., Longstaff, Mithal, and Neis (2005) and Chen, Lesmond, and Wei (2007)). However, academics and policy makers tend to treat both the default premium and the liquidity premium as independent, and thus ignore interactions between them. The financial crisis of 2007 to 2008 demonstrates the importance of such an interaction— deterioration in debt market liquidity caused severe financing difficulties for many financial firms, which in turn exacerbated their credit risk. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model to analyze the interaction between debt market liquidity and credit risk through so-called rollover risk: when debt market liquidity deteriorates, firms face rollover losses from issuing new bonds to replace maturing bonds. To avoid default, equity holders need to bear the rollover losses, while maturing debt holders are paid in full. This

The Ministry of Finance's "Corporate Enterprise Quarterly Statistics" (Hojin kigyo tokei kiho) is the only statistical source of well-balanced information about the financing behavior of Japanese firms. Indeed, there are few comparable sources available anywhere in the world. Using this firm-level data set from 1994 to 2009, the author investigates the financing behavior of Japanese firms with over \10 million in paid-in capital. The conclusions contrast sharply with the conventional wisdom. Much of the research and policy discussions about Japanese finance begin from the premise that banks play a decisive role in firm behavior. This paper shows that firms have maintained a dependence on financial institutions well below the level that the conventional wisdom has claimed. Under the recent "zero-interest-rate, quantity easing" monetary policy, this "independence of the firms from the banks" has increased further. This tendency is clearest among the smaller firms. In turn, this first conclusion raises doubts about the plausibility of the basic premise of research and policy debate on financial issues, and leads us to question whether observers may not have confused a "crisis of financial institutions" with a "financial crisis". Investigation into firm financing behavior under the "financial crisis" from the end of 1997 to the beginning of 1999 does indeed suggest that it was a fiasco caused by the confusion of a "crisis of financial institutions" with a "financial crisis".

A firm’s current leverage ratio is one of the core characteristics of credit quality used in statistical default prediction models. Based on the capital structure literature, which shows that leverage is mean-reverting to a target leverage, we forecast future leverage ratios and include them in the set of default risk drivers. The analysis is done with a discrete duration model. Out-of-sample analysis of default events two to five years ahead reveals that the discriminating power of the duration model increases substantially when leverage forecasts are included. We further document that credit ratings contain information beyond the one contained in standard variables but that this information is unrelated to forecasts of leverage ratios.

The empty creditor problem arises when a debtholder has obtained insurance against default but otherwise retains control rights in and outside bankruptcy. We analyze this problem from an ex ante and ex post perspective in a formal model of debt with limited commitment, by comparing contracting outcomes with and without insurance through credit default swaps (CDS). We show that CDS, and the empty creditors they give rise to, have important ex ante commitment benefits: By strengthening creditors' bargaining power, they raise the debtor's pledgeable income and help reduce the incidence of strategic default. However, we also show that lenders will over-insure in equilibrium, giving rise to an inefficiently high incidence of costly bankruptcy. We discuss a number of remedies that have been proposed to overcome the inefficiency resulting from excess insurance. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.

Credit rating agencies do not only disclose simple ratings but announce watchlists (rating reviews) and outlooks as well. This paper analyzes the economic function underlying the review procedure. Using Moody's rating data between 1982 and 2004, we find that for borrowers of high creditworthiness, rating agencies employ watchlists primarily in order to improve the delivery of information. For low-quality borrowers, in contrast, the review procedure seems to have developed into an implicit contract `a la Boot, Milbourn, and Schmeits (2006), inducing the companies on watch to abstain from risk-augmenting actions. The agencies' economic role hence appears to have been enhanced from a pure information certification towards an active monitoring function.

I build a dynamic capital structure model that demonstrates how business-cycle variations in expected growth rates, economic uncertainty, and risk premia influence firms’ financing and default policies. Countercyclical fluctuations in risk prices, default probabilities, and default losses arise endogenously through firms’ responses to the macroeconomic conditions. These comovements generate large credit risk premia for investment grade firms, which helps address the “credit spread puzzle” and “under-leverage puzzle” in a unified framework. The model generates interesting dynamics for financing and defaults, including “credit contagion” and market timing of debt issuance. It also provides a novel procedure to estimate state-dependent default losses., Katherine Dusak Miller Ph.D. Fellowship in Finance

This paper examines how filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 13 helps financially distressed debtors save their homes. We develop a model of debtors' decisions to default on their mortgages and file for bankruptcy under Chapter 13 and evaluate the model using new data on Chapter 13 bankruptcy filers. We also examine the effect of allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce debtors' mortgage payments, i.e., introducing "cram-down" of mortgages in Chapter 13. We find that 96% of Chapter 13 filers are homeowners and 79% of filers repay mortgage debt in their repayment plans; while just 9% of filers repay only unsecured debt in their plans. These results suggest that filers use Chapter 13 almost exclusively as a "save-your-home" procedure. But under current law, only about 1% Chapter 13 filers save their homes when they would otherwise have defaulted. If cram-down were introduced, we predict that this fraction would increase to 10%. The cost to lenders of introducing cram-down is estimated to be $264,000 per home saved and $30 billion in total.

When a firm is unable to roll over its debt, it may have to seek more expensive sources of financing or even liquidate its assets. This paper provides a normative analysis of minimizing such rollover risk, through the optimal dynamic choice of the maturity structure of debt. The objective of a firm with long-term assets is to maximize the effective maturity of its liabilities across several refinancing cycles, rather than to maximize the maturity of the current bonds outstanding. An advantage of short-term financing is that a firm, while in good financial health, can readjust its maturity structure more quickly in response to changes in its asset value.

We present insolvency practitioners from 88 countries with an identical case of a hotel about to default on its debt, and ask them to describe in detail how debt enforcement against this hotel will proceed in their countries. We use the data on time, cost, and the likely disposition of the assets (preservation as a going concern versus piecemeal sale) to construct a measure of the efficiency of debt enforcement in each country. We identify several characteristics of debt enforcement procedures, such as the structure of appeals and availability of floating charge finance, that influence efficiency. Our measure of efficiency of debt enforcement is strongly correlated with per capita income and legal origin and predicts debt market development across countries. Interestingly, it is also highly correlated with measures of the quality of contract enforcement and public regulation obtained in other studies.

We present evidence on the efficiency of the resolution of financial distress in bankruptcy in The Netherlands. We employ a unique data set based on the files of the trustees and court offices, which includes the characteristics of the firms before and in the bankruptcy procedures, the details of the bankruptcy process and the outcomes. This data allows us to measure the costs and recovery rates in the Dutch liquidation-based bankruptcy system, and to investigate the determinants of these costs and recoveries. We find that direct costs are on average 16%. The costs are lower in larger firms and firms with more bank debt. Costs increase with the time it takes to sell assets and the number of disputes the trustee has to deal with. The firm recovery rate is on average 37%, while the bank recovers on average 80%. The firm recovery rate is influenced by the asset structure and the capital structure. Moreover, an opportunity to continue operations in bankruptcy is chosen by about half the firms and this has a positive effect on recoveries.

From 1980 to 2004, the number of personal bankruptcy filings in the United States increased more than five-fold, from 288,000 to 1.5 million per year. Lenders responded to the high filing rate with a major lobbying campaign for bankruptcy reform that led to the adoption in 2005 of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), which made bankruptcy law much less debtor-friendly. The paper first examines why bankruptcy rates increased so sharply. I argue that the main explanation is the rapid growth in credit card debt, which rose from 3.2% of U.S. median family income in 1980 to 12.5% in 2004. The paper then examines how the adoption of BAPCPA changed bankruptcy law. Prior to 2005, bankruptcy law provided debtors with a relatively easy escape route from debt, since credit card debt and other types of debt could be discharged in bankruptcy and even well-off debtors had no obligation to repay. BAPCPA made this escape route less attractive by increasing the costs of filing and forcing some high-income debtors to repay from post-bankruptcy income. However, because many consumers are hyperbolic discounters, making bankruptcy law less debtor-friendly will not solve the problem of consumers borrowing too much. This is because, when less debt is discharged in bankruptcy, lending becomes more profitable and lenders increase the supply of credit. The paper examines the determinants of an optimal bankruptcy law. It also considers the relationship between bankruptcy law and regulation of lending behavior and discusses proposals that would reduce lenders' incentives to supply too much credit to debtors who are likely to become financially distressed.

We present statistical backtesting procedures applicable in situations where few and heterogeneous probabilities have to be evaluated, as is typically the case when forecasting country default risk. These tests are applied to a sample of default probabilities assessed for 19 emerging market and transition countries by estimating a Merton-type credit risk model using bond market data. For the estimation, we use a maximum likelihood technique based on time series of market data. Thereby, we avoid the drawbacks of alternative approaches commonly used in the literature.

Outright bank failures without prior indication of financial instability are very rare. Supervisory authorities monitor banks constantly. Thus, they usually obtain early warning signals that precede ultimate failure and, in fact, banks can be regarded as troubled to varying degrees before outright closure. But to our knowledge virtually all studies that predict bank failures neglect the ordinal nature of bank distress. Exploiting the distress database of the Deutsche Bundesbank we distinguish four different distress events that banks experience. Only the worst entails a bank to exit the market. Weaker orders of distress are, first, compulsory notifications of the authorities about potential problems, second, corrective actions such as warnings and hearings and, third, actions by banking pillar's insurance schemes. Since the four categories of hazard functions are not proportional, we specify a generalized ordered logit model to estimate the respective probabilities of distress simultaneously. Our model estimates each set of probabilities with high accuracy and confirms, first, the necessity to account for different kinds of distress events and, second, the violation of the proportional odds assumption implicit in most limited dependent analyses of bank failure.

In this paper we develop a contingent valuation model for zero-coupon bonds with default. In order to emphasize the role of maturity time and place of the lender's claim in a firm's debt hierarchy, we consider a firm that issues two bonds with different maturities and different seniorage. The model allows us to analyze the implications of both debt renegotiation and capital structure of a firm on the prices of bonds. We obtain that renegotiation brings about a significant change in the bond prices and that the effect is dispersed through various channels: increasing the value of the firm, reallocating payments, and avoiding costly liquidation. Moreover, the presence of two creditors leads to qualitatively different implications for pricing, while emphasizing the importance of bond covenants and renegotiation of the entire debt.

The following paper is a theoretical and empirical study. The terminological differences between bankruptcy and insolvency have been indicated and compared in the article. Most frequently considered aspects of bankruptcy appear in definitions. The first of them emphasizes the economic character of bankruptcy. Insolvency is a culmination of a lack of financial means and the loss of solvency, which does not have a fading tendency, but develops into a permanent phenomenon. In legal terms, insolvency is an institution, whose purpose is to stop the accumulation of debts and most frequently it consists on the liquidation of the debtor's estate. The main purpose of the study is a critical review of the scientific achievements of the representatives of evolutionary economics within the scope and mechanism of bankruptcy and the survival of enterprises. The analyzed case of the Beta company, which went bankrupt, indicates that the companies which are not able to undertake proper adjustments to competitive conditions of the market at the right moment are eliminated from it. The theoretical law “the survival of the fittest” finds then its reflection in practice. The following research methods were used in the article: a descriptive analysis and the trajectories of J. Argenti in terms of models. Detailed examinations of files of insolvency proceedings of the Beta company have been carried out.

The rescue of the US automobile industry amid the 2008–2009 recession and financial crisis was a consequential, controversial, and difficult decision made at a fraught moment for the US economy. Both of us were involved in the decision process at the time, but since have moved back to academia. More than five years have passed since the bailout began, and it is timely to look back at this unusual episode of economic policymaking to consider what we got right, what we got wrong, and why. In this article, we describe the events that brought two of the largest industrial companies in the world to seek a bailout from the US government, the analysis that was used to evaluate the decision (including what the alternatives were and whether a rescue would even work), the steps that were taken to rescue and restructure General Motors and Chrysler, and the performance of the US auto industry since the bailout. We close with general lessons to be learned from the episode.

Our model assumes that creditors need to expend resources to collect on claims. Consequently, because diffuse creditors suffer from mutual free-riding (Holmstrom (1982)), they fare worse than concentrated creditors (e.g., a house bank). The model predicts that measures of debt concentration relate positively to creditors’ (aggregate) debt collection expenditures and positively to management’s chosen expenditures to resist paying. However, collection activity is purely redistributive, so social waste is larger when creditors are concentrated. If borrower quality is not known, the best firms choose the most concentrated creditors and pay higher expected yields. COORDINATION FAILURE AMONG MULTIPLE CLAIMANTS ,b ethey creditors or owners, is a subject well studied in the academic literature. Such coordination failure can lead to takeover failures (Grossman and Hart (1980)) or bank-runs (e.g., Diamond and Dybvig (1983), Morris and Shin (1999)), or can generally reduce the probability of successful renegotiation to a proposed reorganization plan when renegotiation requires simultaneous assent by many claimants (e.g., �

In a sequence of fascinating papers, Leland and Leland and Toft have investigated various properties of the debt and credit of a firm which keeps a constant profile of debt and chooses its bankruptcy level endogenously, to maximise the value of the equity. One feature of these papers is that the credit spreads tend to zero as the maturity tends to zero, and this is not a feature which is observed in practice. This defect of the modelling is related to the diffusion assumptions made in the papers referred to; in this paper, we take a model for the value of the firm's assets which allows for jumps, and find that the spreads do not go to zero as maturity goes to zero. The modelling is quite delicate, but it just works; analysis takes us a long way, and for the final steps we have to resort to numerical methods.

Is version of EUI ECO; 2013/09 - http://hdl.handle.net/1814/28599 We study a dynamic general equilibrium model in which firms choose their investment level and capital structure, trading off the tax advantages of debt against the risk of costly default. Bankruptcy costs are endogenous, as bankrupt firms are forced to liquidate their assets, resulting in a fire sale if the market is illiquid. When the corporate income tax rate is positive, firms have a unique optimal capital structure. In equilibrium, firms default with positive probability and their assets are liquidated at fire-sale prices. The equilibrium features underinvestment and is constrained inefficient. In particular there is too little debt and default.

*We study cascades of failures in a network of interdependent financial organizations: how discontinuous changes in asset values (e.g., defaults and shutdowns) trigger further failures, and how this depends on network structure. Integration (greater dependence on counterparties) and diversification (more counterparties per organization) have different, nonmonotonic effects on the extent of cascades. Diversification connects the network initially, permitting cascades to travel; but as it increases further, organizations are better insured against one another’s failures. Integration also faces trade-offs: increased dependence on other organizations versus less sensitivity to own investments. Finally, we illustrate the model with data on European debt cross-holdings. (JEL D85, F15, F34, F36, F65, G15, G32, G33, G38) Globalization brings with it increased financial interdependencies among many kinds of organizations—governments, central banks, investment banks, firms, etc.— that hold each other’s shares, debts, and other obligations. Such interdependencies can lead to cascading defaults and failures, which are often avoided through massive bailouts of institutions deemed “too big to fail.” Recent examples include the US government’s interventions in AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and General Motors; and the European Commission’s interventions in Greece and Spain. Although such bailouts circumvent the widespread failures that were more prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they emphasize the need to study the risks created by a network of interdependencies. Understanding these risks is crucial to designing incentives and regulatory responses which defuse cascades before they are imminent. In this paper we develop a general model that produces new insights regarding financial contagions and cascades of failures among organizations linked through a network of financial interdependencies. Organizations’ values depend on each other—e.g., through cross-holdings of shares, debt, or other liabilities. If an

Small businesses, the majority of Spanish firms, rarely file for formal bankruptcy when dealing with financial distress. This is why business bankruptcy rates in Spain are among the lowest in the world, even during the current economic crisis. To explain this fact we present the following hypothesis. Filing for bankruptcy in Spain is very costly for both small firms and their creditors. Due to this, the capital structure of micro firms is biased towards mortgage loans, as it allows them to avoid bankruptcy by carrying out debt enforcement via mortgage foreclosures, which are cheaper procedures than bankruptcy, in case of financial distress. The empirical tests of our hypothesis consist of comparing the observed choices (choice of capital structure, choice between bankruptcy and mortgage) of Spanish firms with those of firms from countries (France and the UK) where their bankruptcy systems are more efficient and their laws do not incentivise them to bias their capital structure towards mortgage loans. Our findings corroborate the proposed hypothesis. As bankruptcy procedures and mortgage foreclosures are not perfect substitutes—i.e., they do not suit well the same type of firms- the underutilization of one of them—reflected in low bankruptcy rates- may lead to efficiency losses 10.1007/s13209-014-0109-7

The paper studies the extent of corporate leverage and range of excessive debt of Slovenian firms during the recent financial crisis. Half of all firms (of those with some non-zero debt and at least one employee) are found to face an unsustainable debt-to-EBITDA leverage ratio beyond 4, accounting for almost 80 per cent of total outstanding debt. Moreover, a good quarter of all firms experience debt-to-EBITDA ratios exceeding 10 and hold almost half of total aggregate net debt. We then examine how this financial distress affects firm performance in terms of productivity, employment, exports, investment and survival. We find that, while less important during the good times (prerecession period), lack of firm financial soundness during the period of financial distress becomes a critical factor constraining firm performance. The extent of financial leverage and ability to service the outstanding debt are shown to inhibit firms’ productivity growth as well as the dynamics of exports, employment and investment. Micro and small firms are found to suffer relatively more than larger firms from high leverage in terms of export and employment performance during the recession period.

In this paper, we develop a dynamic model that captures the interaction between a firm’s cash reserves, the risk management policy and the profitability of a non-predictable irreversible investment opportunity. We consider a firm that has assets in place generating a stochastic cash-flow stream. The firm has a non-predictable growth opportunity to expand its operation size by paying a sunk cost. When the opportunity is available, the firm can finance it either by cash or by costly equity issuance. We provide an explicit characterization of the firm strategy in terms of investment, hedging, equity issuance and dividend distribution.

Starting from the structural model developed by Merton (1974) and the derived notion of distance-to-default, we study the determinants of credit default swap (CDS) spreads for a sample of European banks over a period from January 2006 to December 2011. In particular, we test variables that are specific to the banking industry and look at the possible interaction with CDS spreads for the related sovereigns. We confirm findings from the literature review regarding the low significance of the structural model and its breakdown in times of stress. We confirm the importance of macro-economic components such as the general level of interest rates and the general state of the economy, particularly in times of stress. We find that before the crisis period the micro- and macro-components are generally predominant in the determination of CDS spread variations while the influence of sovereigns’ CDS become more important when entering further into the crisis period. Interestingly, southern European countries are the first to become significant at the start of the crisis. Progressively, all CDS countries become increasingly significant, overweigh all other explanatory variables and remain so even after the crisis period, thereby suggesting the focused attention of market participants for the sovereign dimension.

We present a novel theory to explain the puzzling issue regarding why certain firms in financial distress, that must renegotiate their debt prefer a formal bankruptcy procedure, which is more costly, over direct negotiations with their debtholders. Specifically, we show that claimholders' heterogeneous beliefs about the possible results of a formal plan - and about judicial discretion in particular - may lead to such a preference. In our model, informal processes are preferred when the total value of all corporate claims in a formal procedure, according to each claimholder's beliefs, is less than the total value of the firm's assets in an informal process. In such a case, all claimholders believe that they will be better off under an informal process because there is a positive surplus that can be divided among the parties (Pareto Improving). The proposed model can predict which resolution would be chosen under any set of claimholders' beliefs about the different determinants driving the outcome of a formal procedure, such as the cost of bankruptcy, the likelihood of deviation from the absolute priority rule in a reorganization plan, and the probability of the court adopting a reorganization plan. An empirical analysis of 252 defaults in Moody's annual reports during the 1996-2011 period supports the argument that heterogeneous beliefs and creditor coordination problems are important drivers of the decision to restructure under formal bankruptcy procedures rather than through private workouts.

This article presents a critical analysis of the principles behind the scope and forms of cooperation between EU Member States and third-country resolution authorities in the context of the 2014 Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive. The article also explores the future responsibilities of the prospective Single Resolution Authority regarding relations between the euro area and third-country resolution authorities.

The two recessions that have hit Italy since the end of 2008 have raised the share of non-performing loans to businesses in banks� portfolios substantially. In this paper we evaluate to what extent the deterioration of credit quality was due not only to the decline in firms� sales during the contraction of economic activity, but also to the level of firms� financial debt at the onset of the first recession. Our results show that, other things being equal, a ten percentage point increase in leverage is associated with a higher probability of default of almost one percentage point. Moreover, the adverse impact of a fall in sales on a firm�s solvency is almost four times greater for firms in the highest quartile of the leverage distribution than for firms in the first quartile. These findings confirm that firms� financial structure can be a powerful amplifier of macroeconomic shocks. A higher level of leverage reduces firms� resilience during a recession, and this in turn weakens the balance-sheets of banks and thus their ability to provide credit.

We develop a model of a financially distressed firm to analyze the implications of a bank debt restructuring when the operational characteristics of the firm's project for the post-distress period are endogenously determined as part of the workout. We establish a formal link between the debt restructuring and operational actions such as employee layoffs, and show how these actions are affected by the firm's capital structure, the ordering of absolute priorities, and the allocation of control rights and residual claims after reorganization. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis for the design of reorganization law.

This paper discusses how financial crises in emerging Asia and Japan worked as catalysts for legal reforms. The responses of six Asian countries with different legal histories to financial crises that posed similar challenges are of both legal and economic interest. We first provide a theoretical framework that focuses on law and economics. We then review the basic approaches adopted by the Asian countries affected by financial crises in 1997–1998 to bank and corporate restructuring and to legal and other reforms. Finally we examine indicators that measure the quality of legal institutions (regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption) for the six countries to determine whether these indicators show improvement over time. We find that all six countries pursued significant legal and judicial reforms, but the indicators exhibit mixed results : the Republic of Korea shows clear improvements in all aspects, while the Philippines exhibits clear deterioration and Indonesia indicates a steep decline followed by remarkable improvement. We argue that reforms of the economic laws alone cannot improve the quality of entire legal and judicial systems of countries. What matters is the enforcement of substantive law by procedural law, the efficiency of the justice system, and other political and social factors. In the case of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, the colonial “transplant effect†of Western legal systems may have made the implementation of laws a significant challenge. In Thailand, implementation was affected by the “yellow shirts†(anti-Thaksin) versus “red shirts†(pro-Thaksin) conflict. Long time lags, perhaps of several decades, may be needed to observe how de jure changes to substantive laws lead to de facto improvements of legal institutions.

In this paper, I examine the effect of credit default swaps (CDSs) on the restructuring of distressed firms. Using a sample of U.S. distressed exchange offers during the period 2006–2011, I show that the participation rate among bondholders is significantly lower if the firm has CDSs traded on its debt. To address endogeneity concerns, I use the introduction of the Big Bang Protocol as a natural experiment. The results suggest that firms with CDSs find it difficult to reduce debt out of court. This is important because it can increase the likelihood of future bankruptcy, which is inefficient. The findings are consistent with the empty creditor hypothesis, which posits that bondholders who are hedged with CDSs are less likely to participate in a debt restructuring. The paper also contains direct evidence for the existence of empty creditors. This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance.

We provide a dynamic model of an industry in which agents strategically time liquidation decisions in an effort to protect their reputations. As in traditional models, agents delay liquidation attempting to signal their quality. However, when the industry faces a common shock that indiscriminately forces liquidation of a subset of projects, agents with bad enough projects choose to liquidate even if their projects are unaffected by the shock. Such "blending in with the crowd" creates an additional incentive to delay liquidation, further amplifying the shock. As a result, even minuscule common shocks can be evidenced by massive liquidations. As agents await common shocks, the industry accumulates "living dead" projects. Surprisingly, the potential for moderate negative common shocks often improves agents values.

This paper investigates the interactions between preemptive competition and leverage in a duopoly market. We investigate both a case in which the firms have optimal financial structures, and a case in which financing constraints require firms to finance their investments by debt. Our findings are that the second mover always leaves the duopoly market before the leader, although the leader may exit before the follower's entry. The leverage effects of debt financing can increase the value of a firm and accelerate investment, even in the presence of preemptive competition. Notably, financing constraints can delay preemptive investment and improve firm values in preemptive equilibrium. Indeed, the leader's high leverage due to financing constraints can lower the first-mover advantage and weaken preemptive competition. Especially with strong first-mover advantage, the financing constraint effects can dominate the leverage effects. These findings are almost consistent with the empirical evidence, which shows that high leverage leads to competitive disadvantage and mitigates product market competition.

We explore the ways French judges respond to the possibility of discharging personal debts in exchange for liquidation of debtors’ assets. We present empirical results on the determinants of judicial selection between debtors whose debts are wiped out and those who have to reimburse them. We find that French judges tend to disqualify debtors with multiple creditors from debt discharge, and are sensitive to regional labor market conditions. These empirical results help us understand better how French personal bankruptcy laws perform compared to other national systems. Finally, our results serve to fill the gap between bankruptcy rules and judicial practice.

We investigate financial intermediaries' interest rate risk management as the simultaneous decision of on-balance-sheet exposure and interest rate swap use. Our findings show that both decisions are substitute risk management strategies. A higher likelihood of bank distress makes banks reduce their on-balance sheet interest rate exposure and simultaneously intensify their swap use. Exogeneity tests indicate that both decisions are only endogenous to each other for banks that start using swaps for the first time. For other banks, the maturity gap is endogenous to the decision to use swaps, but the reverse relationship is exogenous. For banks with trading activity, both decisions are exogenous to each other. We interpret these findings as the maturity gap being largely determined by customer liquidity needs, whereas the decision to use swaps relies on compliance with the interest rate risk regulation. Although hedging motives dominate, we find selective hedging behavior in swap use driven by the slope of the yield curve as well as by funding uncertainty.

Financial constraints are not directly observable, so empirical research relies on indirect measures. We evaluate how well five popular measures (paying dividends, having a credit rating, and the Kaplan-Zingales, Whited-Wu, and Hadlock-Pierce indices) identify firms that are financially constrained, using three novel tests: an exogenous increase in a firm's demand for credit; exogenous variation in the supply of bank loans; and the tendency for firms to pay out the proceeds of equity issues to their shareholders ("equity recycling"). We find that none of the five measures identifies firms that behave as if they were constrained: public firms classified as constrained have no trouble raising debt when their demand for debt increases, are unaffected by changes in the supply of bank loans, and engage in equity recycling. The point estimates are little different for supposedly constrained and unconstrained firms, even though we find important differences in their characteristics and sources of financing. On the other hand, privately held firms (particularly small ones) and public firms with below investment-grade ratings appear to be financially constrained.

This paper quantifies the “human costs of bankruptcy” by estimating employee wage losses induced by the bankruptcy filing of employers using employee-employer matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s LEHD program. We find that employee wages begin to deteriorate one year prior to bankruptcy. One year after bankruptcy, the magnitude of the decline in annual wages is 30% of pre-bankruptcy wages. The decrease in wages persists (at least) for five years post-bankruptcy. The present value of wage losses summed up to five years after bankruptcy amounts to 29-49% of the average pre-bankruptcy market value of firm. Furthermore, we find that the ex-ante wage premium to compensate for the ex-post wage loss due to bankruptcy can be of similar magnitude with that of the tax benefits of debt.

The contingent claims analysis of the firm financing often presents a debt renegotiation game with a passive bank which does not use strategically its capability to force liquidation, contrary to what is observed in practice. The first purpose of this paper is to introduce more strategic bank behaviour into the continuous-time model developed by Mella-Barral and Perraudin (1997) and Hackbarth, Hennessy, and Leland (2007). Its second purpose is to account for variations in the information obtained by the parties during the contract period. We show that with public information and private debt only, the optimal probability of debt renegotiation is high when the firm's anticipated liquidation value is high. When we add public debt and asymmetric information, the good-type firm may be tempted to mimic the bad-type to reduce its debt service. We show that to deter such mimicking, banks may sometimes refuse to renegotiate with strong firms having a low liquidation value. We consider private and public debt. At the date of debt emission (when the bank and the firm agree on the private debt level), the bank and the firm do not know the LGD value, so both use the ex ante expected value that set the anticipated ex post renegotiation possibility. After the signature of the debt contract, the firm learns its private LGD while the bank does not observe it, so there is asymmetric information on this parameter at the renegotiation stage. Two scenarios are considered. When we consider an economy where the tax rate is high and a corresponding high debt capacity, the bank has no incentive to fix a renegotiation probability lower than one on any firm type because this would reduce debt value, and thus the firm's debt capacity. However, when the tax rate is sufficiently low, the bank may find it beneficial to use a self-selection mechanism to separate the firm types and increase its debt capacity. We show that a renegotiation probability strictly between zero and one for the bad-type (lower liquidation value) allows the bank to deter the good-type from mimicking the bad-type in order to obtain better renegotiation conditions (sooner and with a lower debt service). Our results are in line with the empirical observation that recovery rate at emergence of bankruptcy is function of the share of private debt in all the firm's debt and is relatively low (Carey and Gordy, 2007).

We study to what extent firms spread out their debt maturity dates across time, which we call granularity of corporate debt. We consider the role of debt granularity using a simple model in which a firm's inability to roll over expiring debt causes inefficiencies, such as costly asset sales or underinvestment. Since multiple small asset sales are less costly than a single large one, firms may diversify debt rollovers across maturity dates. We construct granularity measures using data on corporate bond issuers for the 1991-2011 period and establish a number of novel findings. First, there is substantial variation in granularity in that many firms have either very concentrated or highly dispersed maturity structures. Second, our model's predictions are consistent with observed variation in granularity. Corporate debt maturities are more dispersed for larger and more mature firms, for firms with better investment opportunities, with higher leverage ratios, and with lower levels of current cash flows. We also show that during the recent financial crisis especially firms with valuable investment opportunities implemented more dispersed maturity structures. Finally, granularity plays an important role for bond issuances, because we document that newly issued corporate bond maturities complement pre-existing bond maturity profiles.

The pedestrian narrative about the Greek financial crisis and default is that the country was fiscally mismanaged for a long time and failed to carry out needed structural reforms that could have improved economic growth prospects and enhanced the country’s creditworthiness. Therefore, a default and debt restructuring were inevitable sooner or later—and certainly so once the financial markets were informed, as happened in October 2009, that prior governments had underestimated their budget deficit and public debt figures. The prosaic tale of the supposed inevitability of the Greek tragedy has been endorsed, for example, by a prominent economic historian: “Since independence in the 1830s, Greece has been in a state of default about 50 percent of the time. Does that tell you something?” In reality, Greece’s road to default and debt restructuring in 2012 was not at all straightforward—and there was no historical inevitability about it, either.