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We examine the maturity structure in private placements of debt and relate it to contracting, signaling, tax, and liquidity risk considerations for firms. We find that firms with higher tax rates issue private placements of debt with longer maturities, consistent with the tax hypothesis. However, our results do not support the contracting, signaling, and liquidity risk hypotheses. In addition, the results are confined to the smaller firms in the sample, firms without a public debt rating, and debt issues not pursuant to Rule 144A. The evidence is consistent with smaller firms issuing private placements of debt to avoid monopoly rent extraction from banks.

Using panel data derived from recent financial statements, we examine the relationship between changing creditor protection and leverage (and debt maturity) in a number of emerging market countries located in Central and Eastern Europe. We examine unlisted firms, which are more likely than listed companies to face credit constraints. Our main hypothesis is whether unlisted firms change their leverage and debt maturity as creditor rights increase. We confirm this to be the case at both the country- and firm-level; our findings are robust to alternative econometric specifications and inclusion of country- and firm-level controls. We also find that legal origin is related to the level of debt and its maturity.

The expanded sovereign bond portfolios from the sizeable public interventions in the financial sector during the current crisis need close monitoring and analysis of emerging vulnerabilities. This chapter presents some conventional and new measures of market, credit, and liquidity risks for government bond portfolios, considered from the perspective of a sovereign debt manager. In particular, it examines duration, convexity, and VaR statistics as measures of market exposure; the contingent-claims approach as the most promising measure of credit risk exposure; and a VaR statistic as a measure of liquidity risk.

This case study examines the controversial practice by the Commonwealth of Australia during the period 1988–2002 of using currency swaps as part of its debt management strategy. Although the strategy provided a positive return overall, the impact of currency swap usage created significant year-by-year variations in returns, which posed a risk to debt interest and financing requirements. This suggests that the risk limits imposed on this strategy were both inappropriate and insufficient. Nonetheless, these findings provide insights into how such a policy could best be implemented given recent proposals (OECD, 2007) for derivatives use by public debt managers.

This chapter presents a structural model à la Leland (1994) that is, at the same time, novel, simple, and able to explain the quotes of credit default swaps (CDS), equity, and equity options. The model gives a closed-form formula for the term structure of default probabilities and can be calibrated to fit the CDS spreads. It also offers closed-form formulas for equity, equity volatility, and equity options. Differently from other structural models, debt has been modeled as a perpetual fixed-rate bond, instead of a zero-coupon bond with finite maturity. Therefore, default can happen at any time, and not only at the bond's maturity. The model (which belongs to the class of first-passage models) specifies default as the first time the firm's asset value hits a lower barrier. The barrier is endogenously determined as a solution of an optimal stopping problem (stockholders’ equity maximization). Equity is seen as a portfolio that contains a perpetual American option to default and can be valuated by using the results of Rubinstein-Reiner (1991) for barrier options. Equity options are valued by a closed-form formula that requires only an extra parameter (leverage) with respect to the standard input list of Black–Scholes–Merton equation. The formula is consistent with the volatility skew that is generally observed in the equity options markets and can be used to estimate the firms’ implied leverage, as it is perceived by traders. The chapter concludes with an application of the model to the case of Goldman Sachs.

Myopic going concern practice refers to the current audit going concern opinion that a firm is rewarded a favorable going concern opinion as long as it has the capability to satisfy its debt obligation in the following year. We show, via a structural agency problem we develop in the paper, that such a practice has a potential economic cost to the firm. We study Lucent Technologies Inc. in detail for its loss in economic value and also measure the magnitude of this impact with 500 companies. We find that Lucent should have lost its going concern status in 2002 as it had to sell off its assets to meet debt obligations and nearly 18% of the 500 firms suffer some degree of economic loss due to the agency problem.

Recent studies on the use of private, non-bank, debt have given conflicting results. Instead of a fixed order of preference between various choices of debt as suggested by previous studies, this study postulates that there is a life cycle of debt choice, and as firms move through the cycle, their preferences change. For stable, mature firms, when given a choice, non-bank private debt would fall in between the two extremes of bank debt and public debt. We provide empirical as well as anecdotal evidence from the trade press to support this view. We jointly model the decision to choose a debt source as well as the amount of debt on data from a current database to focus on the “intentional” change in debt levels, rather than those due to unintentional changes. We find that there are significant interdependencies between the decision to borrow from a particular source, as well as the amount of loan, and that taxes, as well as lender reputation, degree of renegotiability and financial flexibility required by the borrower, are key factors that influence the choice of private debt source.

The present study aims to identify the determinants of the capital structure of restaurants firms in Portugal, as well as to analyze the application of capital structure theories in those companies.

In order to reach the objectives, a sample of 400 companies belonging to the restaurant sector was used. The analysis was carried out between 2008 and 2017, and multiple linear regression, based on panel data, was applied.

The obtained results allowed to verify that the considered variables have different effects on the capital structure of the companies under study and that the restaurant sector partially applies the trade-off, pecking order and signaling theories.