This paper uses SSBF data to better understand how the owners of small firms use decisions about legal organization, firm size, capital structure, and owner investment in the firm to manage firm risk. The main findings are: Firms with unlimited liability are smaller, both when measured by assets and number of employees, and tend to be less leveraged than those whose owners limit their personal ...

This paper seeks to explore the application of Altman’s bankruptcy prediction model in the construction industry by measuring its percentage accuracy on a dataset consisting of 108 bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms selected across the timeline of 1985-2013. The main goal of this paper is to explore the predictive power of an expanded variable set tailored to the construction industry compared to ...

Banks could achieve substantial improvements of their portfolio credit risk assessment by estimating rating transition matrices within a time-continuous Markov model, thereby using continuous-time rating transitions provided by internal rating systems instead of discrete-time rating information. A non-parametric test for the hypothesis of time-homogeneity is developed. The alternative hypothesi...

Drought is a main stressor affecting plant production worldwide. Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.) known to exploit biochemical strategies tolerate drought stress. However, the little so far about these does not guarantee safflower yield stability in future. To fill gap, changes traits and antioxidant activities of were monitored using 100 genotypes under two non-stress drought-stress field c...

This paper analyzes the impact of liquid asset holdings on bank profitability for a sample of Iranian banks. Using the Generalized Method of Moment (GMM), this study analyzes the profitability of listed banks using unbalanced panel data over the period of 2002-2009. We use the liquidity asset and liquidity asset-ratio square for estimating liquid asset and profitability relationship. The e...

Brockman and Turtle (2003) develop a barrier option framework to show that default barriers are significantly positive. Most implied barriers are typically larger than the book value of corporate liabilities. We show theoretically and empirically that this result is biased due to the approximation of the market value of corporate assets by the sum of the market value of equity and the book valu...

The paper studies a takeover contests, in which cash-constrained bidders decide on the optimal way to …nance their cash bid. For both bidders and the seller this decision is at least as important as deciding on whether the payment should be in cash or in securities. The main result is that the optimal choice of the type of security contract (e.g., debt, equity, etc.) depends on bidders’access t...

In this paper, we provide a new perspective for understanding cross-sectional properties of equity returns. We explicitly introduce financial leverage in a simple equity valuation model and consider the likelihood of a firm defaulting on its debt obligations as well as potential deviations from the absolute priority rule (APR) upon the resolution of financial distress. We show that financial le...

In this paper I analyze how debt structure and the strategic interaction between shareholders and creditors in the event of default a¤ect expected stock returns. By endogenizing shareholders’decision to default, the model generates new predictions linking …rm characteristics to expected stock returns through an intuitive economic mechanism. In particular, the model predicts that expected stock ...

We propose a novel approach to predicting future volatility of company earnings, in this case EBITDA. Our approach combines predictions of a firm’s probability of default with insights from a relatively less popular a structural model of default. The source of the probabilities of default can be econometric, structural, reduced-form or other models or agency ratings, provided the source has hig...