This study examines the effect of corporate liquidity and investor protection on the relation between financial distress and equity returns using a European sample over the 2002-2016 period. The results show that returns are hump-shaped and decreasing for increasing default risk. This can be rationalized by corporate liquidity indicating that higher cash holdings decrease liquidity risk. Moreov...

Book to market (BM) has long been associated with growth opportunities. We argue that after a negative shock to earnings, the BM of the firm is mainly determined by the shortterm recovery ability of the firm. Firms that have high (low) probability to recover from a negative shock will have low (high) BM after a negative shock. We confirm this relation both analytically and empirically and show ...

In spite of their importance in real economics, multiple equilibria in closed exchange and production-and-exchange economies are usually ignored in macroeconomic models. We argue that default and bankruptcy laws create conditions for a unique equilibrium. We report experimental evidence on the effectiveness of assigning default penalties on fiat money to resolve this multiplicity and select a s...

The goal of this work is to introduce one of the most successful among recently developed statistical techniques – the support vector machine (SVM) – to the field of corporate bankruptcy analysis. The main emphasis is done on implementing SVMs for analysing predictors in the form of financial ratios. A method is proposed of adapting SVMs to default probability estimation. A survey of practicall...

We use a model of mean-shifting investment technologies to study the relationship between market structure, risk taking and social welfare in lending markets. Introduction of loan market competition is shown to reduce lending rates and to generate higher investments without increasing the equilibrium bankruptcy risk of borrowers. Hence, there need not be a tradeo€ between lending market competi...

The relation between physical probabilities (rating) and risk-neutral probabilities (pricing) is derived in a large market with a quasi-factor structure. Factor sensitivities and default probabilities can be estimated for all kinds of credits on historical rating data. Since factor prices are obtainable from market data, the model allows the pricing of non-marketable credits and structured prod...

Financial innovation has increased diversification opportunities and lowered investment costs, but has not reduced the relative cost of active (informed) investment strategies relative to passive (less informed) strategies. What are the consequences? I study an economy with linear production technologies, some more risky than others. Investors can use low quality public information or collect h...

Financial reporting and disclosure are potentially important means for management to communicate firm performance and governance to outside investors. We provide a framework for analyzing managers’ reporting and disclosure decisions in a capital markets setting, and identify key research questions. We then review current empirical research on disclosure regulation, information intermediaries, a...

This paper proposes a rating methodology that is based on a non-linear classification method, the support vector machine, and a non-parametric technique for mapping rating scores into probabilities of default. We give an introduction to underlying statistical models and represent the results of testing our approach on Deutsche Bundesbank data. In particular we discuss the selection of variables...