Shareholders in distressed firms should profit from shifting to more risky assets, but there is little empirical evidence documenting such behavior. We find that this weak evidence is consistent with creditors being somewhat able to control the investment policies of distressed firms if distress...

In this article, we show that only distressed firms not identified as distressed by creditors are able to transfer wealth from creditors to shareholders. Using the number of years to future bankruptcy as a proxy for genuine distress and measures based on observable firm characteristics as...

We study whether industrial firms risk-shift in response to distress risk increases induced through hurricane strikes. Using new proxies capturing deliberate managerial decisions about the risk of a firm's operating segment portfolio, differences tests suggest that hurricane strikes prompt...

We argue that the Merton (1974) model's relatively high ability to forecast bankruptcy stems from its ability to capture either the chance of net worth dropping below an externally-imposed threshold or of an economic insolvency. Using unique bankruptcy data from fifteen countries, our evidence...

In an equilibrium Black and Scholes (1973) economy, a firm's default risk and its expected equity return are non-monotonically related. This may explain the surprising relation found between these two variables in recent empirical research. Although changes in default risk induced by expected...

We offer evidence suggesting a significantly negative relation between firm-level distress risk and the cross-section of corporate bond returns, analogous to the often negative relation between distress risk and stock returns found in prior studies ("distress anomaly"). Our evidence casts doubts...