Are companies with traded credit default swap (CDS) positions on their debt more likely to default? Using a proportional hazard model of bankruptcy and Merton’s contingent claims approach, we estimate the probability of default for U.S. nonfinancial firms. Our analysis does not generally find...

Many commentators have portrayed the tech boom of the late 1990s as an era of unprecedented deterioration in the quality of firms undertaking initial public offerings. But as far back as the early 1980s, firms seeking to go public were displaying signs of financial weakness, and the failure rate...

A large fraction of the companies that went private between 1990 and 2007 were fairly young public firms, often with the same management team making the crucial restructuring decisions both at the time of the initial public offering (IPO) and the buyout. Why did these public firms decide to...

Concern is growing that the U.S. capital markets are losing market share to overseas competitors. A decline in foreign initial public offerings indeed suggests that the U.S. equity market is becoming less attractive to certain issuers. However, evidence on the competitiveness of the U.S. equity...

In the wake of the dot.com collapse, investor sentiment toward initial public offerings (IPOs) has turned negative. To many investors, IPOs have come to symbolize the insider abuses and stock market excesses of the Internet bubble period; to others, investing in IPOs is inherently fraught with...