Prior studies examine real firm behavior and show that high debt makes a firm vulnerable in the product market. In this study, we assess the economic magnitude of competitive effects of debt by examining stock returns. For identification, we use a double-layer of contrasts by conditioning our...

We build a competition network that links two industries through their common market leaders. Industries with higher centrality on the competition network have higher expected stock returns because of higher exposure to the cross-industry spillover of distress shocks. The competition intensity...

This study investigates the ability of three versions of Altman's Z-Score model (Z, Z', and Z”) of distress prediction developed in the U.S. to predict the corporate distress in the emerging market of Sri Lanka. The results show that these models have a remarkable degree of accuracy in...

This study is motivated by the continuing popularity of the Altman Z-score as a measure of distress risk. Altman first introduced the ‘Z' score in 1968 and 50 years later it is still going strong as a means to predicting bankruptcy. During these 50 years, academicians have studied the...

A standard assumption of structural models of default is that firms' assets evolve exogenously. In this paper, we examine the importance of accounting for investment options in models of credit risk. In the presence of financing and investment frictions, fi rm-level variables that proxy for...

This paper examines the effect of CEO risk appetite on the return volatility of a sample of large, listed financial firms over the period 2000-2008. After controlling for firm specific characteristics, the results give strong evidence that the CEO risk appetite has an important effect on firm...

Public firms that seek and successfully receive ertification of quality management, type ISO 9000, seem to experience different post-announcement share-price drifts depending on their size. This result is not consistent with the notion that companies seeking to implement a quality management...

We estimate and test several default risk models using new and unique data on corporate defaults in the German stock market. While defaults were extremely rare events in the 1990s, they have been a characteristic feature of the German stock market since the early 2000s. We apply the structural...

This study uses 469,816 monthly observations of US public firms for the period 1990-2018 to document a strong positive relationship between short-term changes in financial distress risk and future stock price crashes. This result is economically significant as a one interquartile increase of the...

It is well understood that the equity of an insolvent firm can trade for a positive price so long as there is some positive probability that the firm will become solvent at some future point. Currently, however, this insight exists in the case law in an informal sense, while its use in the...