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We study to what extent firms spread out their debt maturity dates across time, which we call "granularity of corporate debt." We consider the role of debt granularity using a simple model in which a firm's inability to roll over expiring debt causes inefficiencies, such as costly asset sales or underinvestment. Since multiple small asset sales are less costly than a single large one, firms may diversify debt rollovers across maturity dates. We construct granularity measures using data on corporate bond issuers for the 1991-2011 period and establish a number of novel findings. First, there is substantial variation in granularity in that many firms have either very concentrated or highly dispersed maturity structures. Second, our model's predictions are consistent with observed variation in granularity. Corporate debt maturities are more dispersed for larger and more mature firms, for firms with better investment opportunities, with higher leverage ratios, and with lower levels of current cash flows. We also show that during the recent financial crisis especially firms with valuable investment opportunities implemented more dispersed maturity structures. Finally, granularity plays an important role for bond issuances, because we document that newly issued corporate bond maturities complement pre-existing bond maturity profiles.
Sovereign bond risk premiums
(2013)
Credit risk has become an important factor driving government bond returns. We therefore introduce an asset pricing model which exploits information contained in both forward interest rates and forward CDS spreads. Our empirical analysis covers euro-zone countries with German government bonds as credit risk-free assets. We construct a market factor from the first three principal components of the German forward curve as well as a common and a country-specific credit factor from the principal components of the forward CDS curves. We find that predictability of risk premiums of sovereign euro-zone bonds improves substantially if the market factor is augmented by a common and an orthogonal country-specific credit factor. While the common credit factor is significant for most countries in the sample, the country-specific factor is significant mainly for peripheral euro-zone countries. Finally, we find that during the current crisis period, market and credit risk premiums of government bonds are negative over long subintervals, a finding that we attribute to the presence of financial repression in euro-zone countries.
This paper takes a novel approach to estimating bankruptcy costs by inference from market prices of equity and put options using a dynamic structural model of capital structure. This approach avoids the selection bias of looking at firms in or near default and therefore permits theories of ex ante capital structure determination to be tested. We identify significant cross sectional variation in bankruptcy costs across industries and relate these to specific firm characteristics. We find that asset volatility and growth options have significant positive impacts, while tangibility and size have negative impacts. Our bankruptcy cost variable estimate significantly negatively impacts leverage ratios. This negative impact is in addition to that of other firm characteristics such as asset intangibility and asset volatility. The results provide strong support for the tradeoff theory of capital structure.