Does the ability to protect an asset from unsecured creditors affect its price? This paper identifies the impact of bankruptcy protection on house prices using 139 changes in homestead exemptions. Large increases in the homestead exemption raised house prices 3% before 2005. Smaller exemption...

This paper provides an alternative approach to the structural credit risk models. The first-passage-time approach extends the original Merton (Journal of Finance 29, 449-470) model by accounting for the fact that the default may occur not only at the debt's maturity, but also prior to this date....

We use an empirical model of commercial mortgage spreads to examine how tenant diversification impacts credit spreads for mortgages on retail properties. We find that mortgages on properties with a highly diversified tenant base have spreads that are up to 7.1 basis points higher than spreads on...