In recent years, a number of firms and banks have decided to “go dark,” i.e., deregister with the Securities and Exchange Commission and delist from the major exchanges despite having a large number of outside shareholders. This paper seeks to answer two important questions: Why do firms...

We find that among firms that file Chapter 11 those that are smaller have better operating performance, and are in higher operating margin industries spend less time in Chapter 11. Firms are more likely to emerge as going concerns and to achieve positive post reorganization profitability if they...

Prior research concludes that option introductions improve the average liquidity of the underlying stocks. We develop an improved, generalizable test to assess whether market quality changes occur on or near an event date. Applying this method to option listing events, we conclude that options...

This paper investigates the effect of closed overnight exchanges on option prices. During the trading day, asset prices follow the literature's standard affine model that allows for stochastic volatility and random jumps. Independently, the overnight asset price process is modeled by a single...

Beginning in the 1990s, firms often continue to trade on the major national exchanges <italic>after</italic> Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings. For bankruptcies filed from 1993–2003, we find that the more negative the filing period price reaction, the more favorable the immediate post-filing returns, on average....

This paper studies the interaction among financing, entry, and exit decisions of firms in a competitive industry subject to aggregate uncertainty. In contrast to Fries, Miller, and Perraudin (1997), I do not assume that a firm in default leaves the industry immediately. The implications on the...

The pricing of corporate debt is still a challenging and active research area in corporate finance. Starting with Merton (1974), many authors proposed a structural approach in which the value of the assets of the firm is modeled by a stochastic process, and all other variables are derived from...

This paper tests the expectations hypothesis (EH) using U.S. monthly data for bond yields spanning the 1952–2003 sample period and ranging in maturity from one month to 10 years. We apply the Lagrange multiplier test developed by Bekaert and Hodrick (2001) and extend it to increase the test...

During the 1990s and beyond, countries around the world witnessed calls and/or mandates for more outside directors on publicly traded companies' boards even though extant studies find no significant correlation between outside directors and corporate performance. We examine the connection...

This study investigates the role of corporate boards following large declines in share value surrounding acquisition announcements. The results indicate that firms with independent boards are less likely to complete these value-decreasing bids, suggesting that boards influence corporate...