This paper empirically investigates a contingent‐claims model of commercial mortgage pricing. We find that the magnitude of the observed default premia for a sample of nonprepayable fixed rate bullet mortgages can be explained by the contingent‐claims model. In addition, the model explains a significant proportion of the period‐to‐period changes in the default premia. However, given an assumed negative correlation between building value changes and interest rate changes, the model's risk structure tends to increase less steeply with increasing maturity than the observed risk structure.

We investigate whether the returns of industry portfolios predict stock market movements. In the US, a significant number of industry returns, including retail, services, commercial real estate, metal, and petroleum, forecast the stock market by up to two months. Moreover, the propensity of an industry to predict the market is correlated with its propensity to forecast various indicators of economic activity. The eight largest non-US stock markets show remarkably similar patterns. These findings suggest that stock markets react with a delay to information contained in industry returns about their fundamentals and that information diffuses only gradually across markets.

We investigate the financial recontracting of firms completing distressed exchanges and those reorganizing under Chapter 11. We find that recovery rates for creditors, on average, are higher in distressed exchanges than in Chapter 11 reorganizations, as are equity deviations from absolute priority. The difference in deviations potentially provides valuable information on the higher costs of formal reorganization. Also, cash is used more extensively to redeem creditors' claims in Chapter 11 than in distressed exchanges. The greater use of cash can be attributed to provisions of the Bankruptcy Code that permit conservation of cash and facilitate asset sales.

Commercial real estate expected returns and expected rent growth rates are time-varying. Relying on transactions data from a cross-section of U.S. metropolitan areas, we find that up to 30% of the variability of realized returns to commercial real estate can be accounted for by expected return variability, while expected rent growth rate variability explains up to 45% of the variability of realized rent growth rates. The cap rate—that is, the rent-price ratio in commercial real estate—captures fluctuations in expected returns for apartments and retail properties, as well as industrial properties. For offices, by contrast, cap rates do not forecast (in-sample) returns even though expected returns on offices are also time-varying. As implied by the present value relation, cap rates marginally forecast office rent growth but not rent growth of apartments, retail properties, and industrial properties. We link these differences in in-sample predictability to differences in the stochastic properties of the underlying commercial real estate data-generating processes. Also, rent growth predictability is observed mostly in locations characterized by higher population density and stringent land-use restrictions. The opposite is true for return predictability. The dynamic portfolio implications of time-varying commercial real estate returns are also explored in the context of a portfolio manager investing in the aggregate stock market and Treasury bills, as well as commercial real estate.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the institutional features of Chapter 11 from an empirical examination of thirty firms that have emerged from reorganization. We find the recontracting framework of Chapter 11 to be complex, lengthy, and costly. Violations of absolute priority in favor of stockholders are frequently encountered. These deviations may result from the bargaining process of Chapter 11 or from a recontracting process between creditors and stockholders which recognizes the ability of stockholder-oriented management to preserve firm value. An example of such recontracting addresses Myers' underinvestment problem. An investigation of the effects of Chapter 11 on the pricing of risky debt is also provided.

This paper puts forward a valuation framework for mortgage‐backed securities. Rather than imposing an optimal, value‐minimizing call condition, we assume that at each point in time there exists a probability of prepaying; this conditional probability depends upon the prevailing state of the economy. To implement our valuation procedure, we use maximum‐likelihood techniques to estimate a prepayment function in light of recent aggregate GNMA prepayment experience. By integrating this empirical prepayment function into our valuation framework, we provide a complete model to value mortgage‐backed securities.

This paper puts forward a valuation framework for mortgage-backed securities. Rather than imposing an optimal, value-minimizing call condition, we assume that at each point in time there exists a probability of prepaying; this conditional probability depends upon the prevailing state of the economy. To implement our valuation procedure, we use maximum-likelihood techniques to estimate a prepayment function in light of recent aggregate GNMA prepayment experience. By integrating this empirical prepayment function into our valuation framework, we provide a complete model to value mortgage-backed securities.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the institutional features of Chapter 11 from an empirical examination of thirty firms that have emerged from reorganization. We find the recontracting framework of Chapter 11 to be complex, lengthy, and costly. Violations of absolute priority in favor of stockholders are frequently encountered. These deviations may result from the bargaining process of Chapter 11 or from a recontracting process between creditors and stockholders which recognizes the ability of stockholder‐oriented management to preserve firm value. An example of such recontracting addresses Myers' underinvestment problem. An investigation of the effects of Chapter 11 on the pricing of risky debt is also provided.

Dollar Cost Averaging is a strategy for purchasing equity securities that is widely recommended by professional investment advisors and commentators, but which has been virtually ignored by academic theorists and textbook writers. In this paper we explore whether the strategy is but another instance of irrational behavior by individual investors, or whether it is an investment heuristic that has survival value in an environment in which security prices exhibit mean reversion behavior that has only belatedly been recognized by academic theorists. Our evidence supports the view that the uninformed individual investors who follow this strategy in purchasing individual stocks to add to an existing portfolio are better off than if they followed the ‘rational’ strategies traditionally recommended by academics.

We study complexity in the market for securitized products, a market at the heart of the financial crisis of 2007–9. The complexity of these products rose substantially in the years preceding the financial crisis. We find that securities in more complex deals default more and have lower realized returns. The worse performance is economically meaningful: a one standard deviation increase in complexity represents an 18% increase in default on AAA securities. However, yields of more complex securities are not higher indicating that investors did not perceive them as riskier. Our results are consistent with complexity obfuscating security quality.