Based on a sample of highly leveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings, we show that reducing a debt overhang leads to a significant improvement in operating performance. Changes in leverage in the debt restructurings are instrumented with Unexpected Snow, which captures the extent to which a ski hotel experienced unusually good or bad snow conditions prior to the debt restructuring. Unexpected Snow provides lending banks with the counterfactual of what would have been the ski hotel's operating performance in the absence of strategic default, allowing them to distinguish between ski hotels that are in distress due to negative demand shocks (“liquidity defaulters”) and those that are in distress due to debt overhang (“strategic defaulters”).

We explain and provide evidence for effects of leverage on pricing. Our model identifies two effects that either counteract or reinforce each other, depending on the debt maturity structure: (i) firms set higher prices (underinvest in market share) if they have more debt, and (ii) firms engage in dynamic risk-shifting by setting lower (higher) prices if the current debt obligation will be higher (lower) in the next period than in the present period. Using a unique dataset of owner-managed hotels in Austrian ski resorts, we provide empirical evidence of both effects. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.