We examine whether a firm's debt maturity structure affects its credit quality. Consistent with theory, we find that firms with greater exposure to rollover risk (measured by the amount of long-term debt payable within a year relative to assets) have lower credit quality; long-term bonds issued...

We examine the joint optimization of financial leverage and irreversible capacity investment in a real options framework with risky debt and endogenous interest costs. Higher capacity, ceteris paribus, increases operating leverage and default probability, but lowers ex post adjustment costs and...

We investigate the effect of poor performance on financial intermediary reputation by estimating the effect of large-scale bankruptcies among a lead arranger's borrowers on its subsequent syndication activity. Consistent with reputation damage, such lead arrangers retain larger fractions of the...