Search Results
Working Paper
The timing of debt issuance and rating migration: theory and evidence
This paper develops and tests a recursive model of debt issuance and rating migration. We examine a signaling game with firms who have private information about their probability distribution of future rating migration. A key assumption of the model is that rating agencies reveal information over time, creating a recursive information problem, which in turn generates an adverse selection problem in debt issuance similar to that for equity issuance in Myers and Majluf (1984). This adverse selection model predicts that debt issuance provides a negative signal of rating migration, and that the ...
Working Paper
The evolution of a financial crisis: panic in the asset-backed commercial paper market
The $350 billion contraction in the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market in the last five months of 2007 played a central role in transforming concerns about the credit quality of mortgage-related assets into a global financial crisis. This paper attempts to better understand why the substantial contraction in ABCP occurred by measuring and analyzing runs on ABCP programs over the period from August 2007 through December 2007. While it has been suggested that commercial paper programs, like commercial banks, may be prone to runs, we are the first to conduct a comprehensive empirical ...
Working Paper
Why are bank profits so persistent: the roles of product market competition, informational opacity, and regional/macroeconomic shocks
We investigate how banking market competition, informational opacity, and sensitivity to shocks have changed over the last three decades by examining the persistence of firm-level rents. We develop propagation mechanisms with testable implications to isolate the sources of persistence. Our analysis suggests that different processes underlie persistent performance at the high and low ends of the distribution. Our tests suggest that impediments to competition and informational opacity continue to be strong determinants of performance; that the reduction in geographic regulatory restrictions had ...
Working Paper
Insolvency or liquidity squeeze? Explaining very short-term corporate yield spreads
In this paper, we first document some stylized facts about very short-term and long-term corporate yield spreads. We find that short-term spreads are sizable, and the correlations between many firms' short-term and long-term yield spreads are at times negative. We then develop a structural model that generates levels and correlations of short-term and long-term spreads that are more consistent with what we observe. The model allows for the possibility of payment delays when a firm's liquid asset position deteriorates. Payment delays generate sizable short-term debt spreads because the ...
Journal Article
A reconsideration of the risk sensitivity of U.S. banking organization subordinated debt spreads: a sample selection approach
The authors estimate a sample selection model over three distinct regulatory "regimes" when the treatment of bank bondholders (in the event of bank failures) differed substantially. They then estimate their selection model to test the strength of bond market discipline over these three regulatory regimes, finding that bank bond spreads are positively associated with bank risk measures during all three regimes, even during the too-big-to-fail period.
Working Paper
Market discipline in banking reconsidered: the roles of deposit insurance reform, funding manager decisions and bond market liquidity
This paper demonstrates that the risk sensitivity of a banking organization's subordinated debt yield spreads may understate the potential for market discipline in some periods and overstate in others because such spreads contain liquidity premiums that are driven, in part, by the risk-sensitivity of funding manager decisions. Once such decisions are accounted for, new evidence is provided that indicates that subordinated debt spreads were sensitive to organization-specific risks in the mid-1980s, and that the risk- sensitivity of such spreads was about the same in the pre- and post-FDICIA ...
Working Paper
Financial stability monitoring
While the Dodd Frank Act (DFA) broadens the regulatory reach to reduce systemic risks to the U.S. financial system, it does not address some important risks that could migrate to or emanate from entities outside the federal safety net. At the same time, it limits the types of interventions by financial authorities to address systemic events when they occur. As a result, a broad and forward-looking monitoring program, which seeks to identify financial vulnerabilities and guide the development of pre-emptive policies to help mitigate them, is essential. Systemic vulnerabilities arise from ...
Working Paper
Are longer bankruptcies really more costly?
We test the widely held assumption that longer restructurings are more costly. In contrast to earlier studies, we use instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of restructuring time and creditor return. Instrumenting proves critical to our finding that creditor recovery rates increase with duration for roughly 1 years following default, but decrease thereafter. This, and similar results using the likelihood of reentering bankruptcy, suggest that there may be an optimal time in default. Moreover, the default duration of almost half of our sample is well outside the optimal default ...