We develop an equilibrium model of debt maturity choice of rms, in the presence of xed issuance costs in primary debt markets, and an over-the-counter secondary debt market with search frictions. Liquidity in this market is related to the ratio of buyers to sellers, which is determined in...

Because of limited liability, insolvent banks have an incentive to roll over bad loans, in order to hide losses and gamble for resurrection, even though this is socially inefficient. We suggest a scheme that regulators could use to solve this problem. The scheme would induce banks to reveal...

Recovery rates are negatively related to default probabilities (Altman et al.,2005). This paper proposes and estimates a model in which this dependence is the result of an unobserved credit cycle: When times are bad, the default probability is high and recovery rates are low; when times are...