This paper examines whether new equity may be issued to recapitalize existing assets in financially distressed firms. Using a sample of 3,184 follow-on primary common stock issues offered by Korean publicly traded firms from 2000–2013, we find that more than one-third of the equities are issued to creditors in direct exchange for debt. We also determine that equity issuers are in severe financial distress prior to the issue and are more likely to experience a subsequent change in control. The proceeds are used more to replace existing debt than to increase R&D. These findings suggest that equity issues in emerging markets may be used primarily to recapitalize existing assets through debt restructuring or control transfers rather than to finance growth options.

We estimate the term structures of the default probabilities for private firms using data consisting of 1759 default events from 29,894 firms between 1999 and 2014. Each firm’s default likelihood is characterized by a forward intensity model employing macro risk factors and firm-specific attributes. As private firms do not have traded stock prices, we devise a methodology to obtain a public-firm equivalent distance-to-default by projection that references the distance-to-defaults of public firms with comparable attributes. The fitted model provides accurate multi-period forecasts of defaults, leading to both economically and statistically significant benefits over benchmark models. The reported interest rates charged to private firms are reflective of the estimated default term structure.

We document that capital flows in and out of emerging or developed markets are sensitive to global equity market conditions. Capital tends to move out of emerging into developed countries in global down markets, leading to depreciation (appreciation) of emerging (developed) currencies. This generates a positive (negative) correlation between currency and equity in emerging (developed) markets which is amplified by the magnitude of the capital movement. We also verify that hedging currency risks may undo the natural hedge and increase the total return volatility under negative correlation.

We examine the implications of special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) in South Korea, where sponsor contracts are better aligned than in the U.S. Unlike in U.S. where SPAC targets (de-SPACs)' post-merger prices generally fall below the SPAC IPO offer price due to distorted incentives of the SPAC sponsors, Korean de-SPACs' prices tend to remain above the initial SPAC price. The better alignment of incentives results in positive or at least non-negative average buy-and-hold returns and excess portfolio returns in Korean de-SPACs, which contrast with the negative long-run performance observed in the U.S. Korean de-SPACs also increase investment more than matched private firms following the listing. Overall, our results suggest that better aligned sponsor contracts may incentivize sponsors to target high-quality firms, enhancing post-merger performance.