We present a model where bank assets are a portfolio of risky debt claims and analyze stockholders' risk-taking behavior while considering the strategic interaction between debtors and creditors. We find that: (1) as the leverage of a bank increases, risk shifting by borrowers increases, even if...

We study the influence of unsecured debt (subdebt) and of bail-in debt on banks' risk-taking in a contingent claim model, while considering the bargaining between stockholders and debtholders. We show that replacing stock with subdebt: (1) leads to fewer risk-shifting events, but generates a...

Black and Cox (1976) claim that the value of junior debt is increasing in asset risk when the firm's value is low. We show, using closed-form solution, that the junior debt's value is hump-shaped. This has interesting implications for the market-discipline role of banks' junior debt (subdebt)

While it is clear that returns of financial assets are not well described by the normal distribution, it is unclear how best to describe them. One distribution suggested is the Pareto distribution. I apply an extreme value theory framework to estimate the tails of the distributions of returns of...

We present a structural method for measuring the upper bound for the illiquidity risk of liabilities issued by a levered firm. The method calculates the upper bound of illiquidity spread of a corporate bond given its duration and the issuing firm's asset risk and leverage ratio. Consistent with...

We generalize the prevailing theoretical models that estimate the discount on securities for lack of marketability, by considering the discrete trading frequency of the securities. The generalization shows that accounting for the illiquidity of securities may significantly reduce their...