Moody's endorses the Basel Committee's proposal to use banks' internal risk assessments to re®ne the Basel Accord's risk weights on bank assets and commitments. External risk assessments, such as Moody's credit ratings, will likely play a supporting role as direct inputs into banks' internal rating systems and as tools for benchmarking and validating those systems. However, the widespread use o...

This paper empirically tests the determinants of foreign currency hedging using a large sample of UK non-financial firms. I find, unlike similar studies using US data, strong evidence of a relationship between expected financial distress costs and the foreign currency hedging decision and more significantly the foreign currency only hedging decision. This contrast in the findings between this s...

In this paper, we have revised and updated our earlier study in order to analyze the most recent (second) draft of the BIS’s proposed reforms of bank capital requirements. We conduct Monte-Carlo experiments using data on defaults and severity rates on publicly-traded US corporate bonds over the 1981–1999 period. Analyzing the whole period and various sub-periods, it is clear that the most recen...

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 empt...

I consider the implications of alternative bankruptcy regimes for student loans in a heterogeneous model of life-cycle earnings and risky human capital accumulation. Findings suggest that the ability level of high-school graduates drives the decision to enroll in college, while the initial human capital level is crucial for completing college. Also, the correlation between parental wealth and a...

This paper employs bond transaction data from 2002 and 2011 to investigate the trading activity and price dynamics of defaulted corporate bonds, aiming to shed light on the impact of financial distress on trading liquidity and market frictions. We find that, following default, bonds experience more active trading, wider bid-ask spreads, and a sharp drop in prices followed by price reversals. Fu...

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the impact of macroeconomic conditions on credit risk and dynamic capital structure choice. We begin by observing that when cash flows depend on current economic conditions, there will be a benefit for firms to adapt their default and financing policies to the position of the economy in the business cycle phase. We then demonstrate that this simple ...

We propose new specifications that explicitly account for information noise in the input data of bankruptcy hazard models. The specifications are motivated by a theory of modeling credit risk with incomplete information (Duffie and Lando [2001]). Based on over 2 million firm-months of data during 1979-2012, we demonstrate that our proposed specifications significantly improve both insample mode...

Debt with many creditors is analyzed in a continuous-time pricing model of the levered rm. We speci cally allow for debtor opportunism vis-a-vis a non-coordinated group of creditors, in form of repeated strategic renegotiation o ers and default threats. We show that the creditors' initial entitlement to non-collateralized assets will be expropriated through exchange o ers. Exchange o ers succes...

Empirical evidence documents a tight link between aggregate and firm-level investment and corporate credit spreads. Moreover, it has been shown that credit spreads largely reflect a compensation for bearing macroeconoimc risks. We use a tractable model with recursive preferences and time varying macroeoconomic risk to investigate the link between aggregate risk and corporate policies in a produ...