An important advantage of secured relative to unsecured debt is that it provides better protection against dilution from other creditors of the firm. While covenants may provide unsecured lenders protection from dilution arising from the issuance of additional debt, they are less likely to be...

Past studies document that incentive conflicts may lead issuer-paid credit rating agencies to provide optimistically-biased ratings. In this paper, we present evidence that investors question the quality of issuer-paid ratings and raise corporate bond yields where the issuer-paid rating is more...

We provide evidence that a firm's exposure to industry downturns, what we refer to as industry risk, is an important factor affecting ex post recovery rates and ex ante bank loan pricing and the borrowing firms use of cash. The basic idea is that if it is costly to redeploy industry assets, then...

Using hand-collected data on corporate bond and stock offerings, we identify the impact of government debt on corporate financing during World War I. The early twentieth century provides a unique opportunity to identify the impact of government debt on private financing because during this...