We show that profit-seeking institutional investors can provide valuable liquidity and spur the recovery of distressed housing markets. Using a quasi-natural experiment wherein investors purchased pre-packaged distressed home portfolios from the government-sponsored enterprises, we find that...

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...

We provide new evidence that the bankruptcy filing of a locally headquartered and publicly-listed manufacturing firm imposes externalities on the local governments. Compared to matched counties with similar economic trends, municipal bond yields for affected counties increase by 10 bps within a...

Using a comprehensive sample of 2,585 bankruptcies from 1990 to 2019, we benchmark the performance of various machine learning models in predicting financial distress of publicly traded U.S. firms. We find that gradient boosted trees outperform other models in one-year-ahead forecasts. Variable...

We find a positive cross-sectional relationship between expected stock returns and default risk, contrary to the negative relationship estimated by prior studies. Whereas prior studies use noisy ex post realized returns to estimate expected returns, we use ex ante estimates based on the implied...