Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines debt restructurings by financially distressed firms. We develop a model which predicts that, in public debt exchange offers, firms with unfavorable private information will offer equity claims to convince bondholders that the firm's prospects are poor. In contrast, offering equity to well-informed private lenders conveys favorable private information to outsiders. Consistent with our analysis, we find positive average abnormal returns around restructurings that offer equity to private lenders and senior debt to public debtholders, and we find significant negative average abnormal returns when private lenders are offered senior debt and public lenders are offered equity.

This paper investigates whether portfolio return autocorrelation can be explained by time-varying expected returns, nontrading, state limit orders, market maker inventory policy, or transaction costs. Evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that transaction costs cause portfolio autocorrelation by slowing price adjustment. I develop a transaction-cost model which predicts that prices adjust faster when changes in valuation are large in relation to the bid-ask spread. Cross-sectional tests support this prediction, but time-series tests do not.