In a recent critique of the ‘market discipline’ literature in banking, Gorton and Santomero [ Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 22 (1990) 119–128] emphasize the need for adopting a rigorous valuation model in order to test for the existence of market discipline. They employ a standard version of the contingent claims pricing model in which firm-value risk is the only source of uncertainty. In this paper we extend their model by also incorporating interest rate uncertainty. The results reported here demonstrate the complex interaction effects arising from the joint uncertainties of firm risk and interest rate risk. No simple monotonie relationship exists with respect to interest rate uncertainty. The analysis presented in this paper is also applicable to a much wider class of debt-valuation problems and is not restricted to a specific question of banking policy.

This paper provides the first theoretical explanation and the first empirical analysis of contingent value rights (CVRs), which have been used as a means of payment in acquisitions, exchange offers, debt restructurings, Chapter 11 reorganizations, and lawsuit settlements. A CVR is a put option committing to pay additional cash or securities to CVR holders, contingent on the issuer's share price falling below a prespecified reference level. In this paper, we develop a model to show that CVRs can help a higher-intrinsic-value firm to reveal its firm type when the firm faces an asymmetric information problem. Our model predicts that i) when CVRs are offered along with cash or stock, the announcement period abnormal stock return is greater than that in stock offers, ii) firms facing more severe asymmetric information problems are more likely to offer CVRs to signal their firm type, and iii) firms that are relatively more cash-constrained are more likely to offer CVRs rather than cash. We test all three predictions using a sample of mergers and acquisitions. Our empirical results are consistent with the predictions of the model.

This paper examines a recent sample of public workouts for distressed high-yield debt. The nature of holdouts and the effectiveness of coercive tactics in alleviating the holdout problem is analyzed. Tender offers are in relatively less financial distress, exhibit more severe holdouts, and are more coercive than exchange offers. Tender offers also have higher completion rates and fewer Chapter 11 filings. Security prices react positively to announcements of tender offers, negatively to exchange offers. Evidence suggests that coercion is not detrimental to bondholders, and may benefit security holders by increasing the likelihood of a less costly, out-of-court restructuring.

Several recent papers have documented the benefits of debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing in the restructuring of firms in Chapter 11. However, the view on benefits is not unanimous and some legal scholars have raised doubts about DIP financing's effects on debt-holders and the possibility of expropriative wealth transfers. In this paper we address this issue by analyzing both stock and bond price data for a comprehensive sample of DIP loans and find significant positive abnormal stock and bond returns at the announcement of DIP loans. Also, we do not find evidence of wealth transfers from junior to senior debt-holders. Further, we examine the DIP loan process in detail and we document important institutional features of DIP loans such as maturity, covenants, fees and interest charges. We find evidence of intense monitoring using covenants. We also find higher fees and charges associated with DIP loans. We argue that overall the results are consistent with the information processing role of financial intermediaries.

We test several hypotheses on how takeover premium is related to investors' divergence of opinion on a target's equity value. We show that the total takeover premium, the pre-announcement target stock price run-up, and the post-announcement stock price markup are all higher when investors have higher divergence of opinion. We obtain identical results with higher market-level investor sentiment. When divergence of opinion is higher, a firm is less likely to be a takeover target, although takeover synergy in successful takeovers is higher. Our results suggest that takeovers may play a role in explaining high contemporaneous stock prices in the presence of high divergence of investor opinion.

We conjecture that high stock liquidity negatively affects firm valuation by inducing inefficient investment. Using takeovers of public targets to study the empire-building motive, we find that a liquid firm is more likely than an illiquid firm to acquire a public firm. Such a takeover by a bidder with higher stock liquidity destroys bidder value to a larger degree. These patterns occur in both stock and cash acquisitions and hold after we use decimalization of tick size as a quasi-exogenous shock to stock liquidity. Finally, we show that financial constraints and corporate governance play important roles in the effects of stock liquidity on empire building in mergers and acquisitions.