This paper endogenizes the cost of external funds and explores the implications on irreversible investments. The investment strategy incorporates equilibrium feedback that result from a bargaining process between the firm and a lender. Contrary to debt issuance, tax benefits and distress costs cannot be internalized by the firm. “Bad news” are less costly for the firm that has incentives to acc...

In this paper we develop a two-step survival time approach – a discrete logit model with survival time dummies – that allows for time-varying explanatory variables and interval censored data. Our empirical analysis reveals that the twostep approach outperforms the benchmark logit model with respect to out-ofsample prediction accuracy. Survival time, however, does not play an important role. The...

Debtor-friendly laws can encourage innovation by reducing the cost of failure for innovators, but can also harm innovation if they tighten the availability of credit to innovators. We use state and year variation in U.S. personal bankruptcy laws, which affect the capital constraints of individual innovators and small firms, to investigate the effects of debtor protection on innovation. We find ...

This paper adopts a contingent-claim valuation framework to investigate the role of subordinated debt in alleviating the moral hazard problem in banking and providing the regulator with the information on the risk of bank assets. The incorporation of bankruptcy cost in the framework of the analysis provides some new evidence about the potential role of subordinated debt. The extent of market di...

This paper investigates if bankruptcy of Japanese listed companies can be predicted using data from 1992 to 2005. We find that the traditional measures, such as Altman’s (1968) , Ohlson’s (1980) and the option pricing theorybased distance-to-default, previously developed for the US market, are also individually useful for the Japanese market. Moreover, the predictive power is substantially enha...

We develop a model in which cash-constrained entrepreneurs seek a venture capitalist (VC) to finance a new firm. Costly monitoring is employed by VCs to reduce entrepreneurial moral hazard. When monitoring reveals poor performance, VCs want to punish the entrepreneur with liquidation. However, when assets are specific and liquidation would lead to a loss, VCs choose to renegotiate the terms of ...

This paper studies whether banks charge higher or lower interest rates on loans to firms with overconfident CEOs. It establishes a theoretical model to show the relationship between the loan rate and overconfidence of the borrowing firm’s CEO. It also conducts empirical analyses to test the predictions of the model. As predicted in the model, firms with overconfident CEOs enjoy lower loan rates...

We use Hurricane Katrina’s damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a cost shock. We find storm damage had a “cleansing” effect on businesses: damaged establishments that returned to operation were more resilient than those that had never been damaged. This effect is particularly strong for establishments belonging to younger...

This paper investigates the impact of asset liquidity on the valuation of corporate securities and the firm’s financing decisions. I show that asset liquidity increases debt capacity only when bond covenants restrict the disposition of assets. By contrast, I demonstrate that, with unsecured debt, greater liquidity increases credit spreads on corporate debt and reduces optimal leverage. The mode...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid model which combines locally linear embedding (LLE) algorithm and support vector machines (SVM) to predict the failure of firms based on past financial performance data. By making use of the LLE algorithm to perform dimension reduction for feature extraction, is then utilized as a preprocessor to improve business failure prediction capability by ...