To estimate the expected cost of technical default for equityholders, we analyze the stock market reaction to changes in the ex-ante likelihood of technical default. Our large-sample, ex-ante estimates exceed five percent of equity value, which reflects material monetary and risk consequences of...

Our objective is to test for evidence of information asymmetry in the mortgage servicing market. Does the sale of mortgage servicing rights (MSR) by the initial lender to a second servicing institution unveil any residual asymmetric information? We are the first to analyze the originator's...

The electricity commodity exchange is a place where you can sell and buy, among other things, electricity. Is the sale free from profit-generating activities that have no relation to the production costs incurred ? Here, we suggest a mathematical model that tracks this type of the non-ethical...

Do rating agencies increase or decrease financial market stability? This paper analyzes whether credit rating agencies may help to avoid inefficient self-fulfilling credit defaults. If investors follow risk-dominant strategies, we show that rating announcements and investors' private information...

Financial innovation has increased opportunities for diversification and lowered investment costs, but has not reduced the relative cost of active (informed) investment strategies compared with passive (less informed) strategies. What are the consequences? I have studied an economy with linear...

Inspired by Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009), we propose risk-neutral options' implied measures of riskiness and investigate their significance in predicting the cross section of expected returns per unit of risk. The empirical analyses indicate a negative and significant...

The opacity of over-the-counter (OTC) markets – in which a large number of financial products including credit derivatives trade – appears to have played a central role in the ongoing financial crisis. We model such OTC markets for risk-sharing in a general equilibrium setup where agents...

In this paper, we intend to explain an empirical finding that distressed stocks delivered anomalously low returns (Campbell et. al. (2008)). We show that in a model where investors have heterogeneous preferences, the expected return of risky assets depends on idiosyncratic coskewness betas,...

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the choice of cut-off points, sampling procedures, and the business cycle on the accuracy of bankruptcy prediction models. Misclassification can result in erroneous predictions leading to prohibitive costs to firms, investors and the economy....