Note: This paper has been published in the "International Review of Finance." It is published in: Vol 3, No.1, March 2002,pp. 27-52 of the journal.

We augment the LLSV creditor rights index with a new “restructuring index” that measures the incentives provided to creditors to grant concessions outside formal bankruptcy. We study the joint impact of the two indexes on a firm's leverage policy. We show that the two indexes have at most a...

Large orders for corporate bonds get preferential treatment unlike large orders for stocks on the NYSE. A structural explanation, namely, that the corporate bond market is dealer-dominated has been offered for the favorable pricing. In this paper, we offer an additional explanation, namely, that...

There is a wide body of literature in corporate finance that examines the tradeoffs between liquidation and re-organization for creditors in financially distressed firms (Kahl (2002), Hotchkiss (1995), Gertner and Scharfstein (1991)). We incorporate salient elements from this literature into a...

ETFs attract a larger proportion of institutional investors than do the underlying markets. The price of an ETF will deviate from the price of the underlying, if institutional investors are less prone to investor sentiment-driven mispricing, than are retail investors. We employ a unique...

We analyze the determinants and consequences of option listing on IPO firm stock. We find that options are listed earlier on venture-backed and lower-reputation underwriter IPOs. We find a significant decrease in stock returns immediately after option listing, persisting for a year. Analyzing...

New bankruptcy laws which give greater protection to creditors were signed into law in Brazil on Feb 9, 2005. The paper tests whether greater protection to creditors led to growth in capital markets in Brazil as predicted by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny (1997, 1998, 2002 and...

We examine a sample of 125 equity mutual funds that closed to new investment between 1993 and 2004. We find that funds close following a period of superior performance and abnormal fund inflows. Fund managers raise their fees when they close to compensate managers for losses in income due to the...

We study the pricing of Argentine ADRs during and after the transition of the Argentine economy from a pegged exchange rate to a freely floating exchange rate regime. We document a discount of 30% between the dollar denominated price of the ADR and the peso denominated price of its local...