We examine how equity-market frictions that restrict pessimistic trading, such as short-sale constraints, affect assessments of default risk. We find that these frictions decrease the usefulness of equity-market variables for identifying defaulting firms but increase their usefulness for...

Probability of default prediction is one of the important tasks of rating agencies as well as of banks and other financial companies to measure the default risk of their counterparties. Knowing predictors that significantly contribute to default prediction provides a better insight into...

De- and re-levering betas is important to obtain discount rates for assets that are not publicly traded. A de- and re-levering procedure is around for the case of risk-free debt. The procedure for risky debt is much less clear even under very simplifying assumptions. In this paper, I concretize...

Purpose The ownership structure in Japanese firms has experienced a significant change recently, fueled primarily by regulatory changes. This has important repercussions on corporate performance and risk. This paper examines the impact of insider ownership on the default risk of Japanese firms....

The standard measures of distress risk ignore the fact that firm defaults are correlated and that some defaults are more likely to occur in bad times. We use risk premium computed from corporate credit spreads to measure a firm’s exposure to systematic variation in default risk. Unlike...