There are two laws in Canada allowing for the reorganization of corporate businesses: Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BLA) for SME and Company Creditors' Arrangement Act (CCAA) for larger firms. The number of corporations which have initiated a BIA reorganization procedure since the early 90's is...

The relationship between the stock-market implication of a bankrupt firm's prospect and the unsecured creditors' recovery rate is often overlooked as they are seemingly unrelated to each other. However, if the APR is strictly applied, the existing shareholders of a bankrupt firm will not be...

In recent years, U.S. government entities have become increasingly active as commercial participants in corporate restructurings by providing rescue loans when private market funding is unavailable. Like private lenders, the government can effectively control the operations of distressed...

This is the first study on the risk-neutral distribution of option returns. We derive solutions for the risk-neutral variance, skewness, and kurtosis of call and put option returns and document several properties of these ex-ante moments. We find that the volatility, skewness, and kurtosis of...

When lenders gain control rights in technical default, they influence corporate operating decisions. We develop a novel measure of operational risk-taking that utilizes industry-specific data on corporate operations. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that borrowers reduce...

We document the valuation effects of bankruptcy announcements through technological relatedness. The average value of firms that intensively cite the technologies of a bankrupt firm decreases by 1% around the time of the bankruptcy announcement. The effects are not attributable to other economic...

In 2008, AIG found itself on the brink of failure and required the Federal Reserve to step in with billions of dollars of taxpayer money. The causes of AIG's collapse have been described in numerous articles and official reports since then. Albeit some nuances, all analyzes point to AIG's credit...

Assuming benevolent managers, the debt-overhang problem suggests that distressed firms generally refrain from issuing equity. In contrast, agency theory predicts that distressed firm managers have strong self-interests to finance even deteriorating projects through equity issuance. This paper...

Our paper investigates spillover effects across different business segments of publicly traded financial conglomerates. We find that the investment decisions of mutual fund shareholders do not just depend on the prior performance of the mutual funds, they also depend on the prior performance of...