We study a continuous time model of a levered firm with fixed assets generating a cash flow which fluctuates with business conditions. Since external finance is costly, the firm holds a liquid (cash) reserve to help survive periods of poor business conditions. Holding liquid assets inside the...

Equilibrium credit rationing, in the sense of Stiglitz and Weiss (1981), implies the borrower faces an infinite marginal cost of funds. Infinitessimily delaying the project to accumulate more wealth is therefore advantageous to the borrower. As a result, the well-known conditions for credit...

This paper presents a model of the interaction of a company’s financial and real investment decisions with the financing of its defined benefit pension plan. The pension plan deficit is a debt of the company, with explicit funding requirements and priority in the event of company insolvency....

This paper presents a general equilibrium analysis on the interactions between pension plan funding, capital structure, technology choice and the equity premium. The paper shows that economies with large funded defined pension schemes may be biased towards safe production. The pricipal results...

This paper solves for a firm's optimal cash holding policy within a continuous time, contingent claims framework that has been extended to incorporate most of the significant contracting frictions that have been identified in the corporate finance literature. Under the optimal policy the firm...

We study the relation of financial development and the pace of technological advance in a dynamic agency theoretic model. A firm which is financed by outside shareholders but run by managers has the prospect of a process innovation which arrives stochastically. Adopting the innovation requires...

Equilibrium credit rationing in the sense of Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) implies the marginal cost of funds to the borrower is infinite. So borrowers have an overwhelming incentive to cut their loan by a dollar and thereby avoiding being rationed. Ways of doing this include scaling down the...

In this paper we study the pricing of credit risk as reflected in the market for credit default swaps (CDS) between 2003 and 2008. This market has newly emerged as the reference for credit risk pricing because of its use of standardized contract specifications and has achieved a higher level of...