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Purpose – The relation between research and development (R&D) expenditures and bondholder wealth is examined.

Methodology/approach – A sample of firms that increase R&D expenditures is partitioned into two subsamples: firms with high default risk versus firms with low default risk. For each subsample, we examine the effect of R&D increases on bond returns and default risks.

Findings – For firms with high default risk, R&D increases have a negative impact on bond returns and default risk. Further, there is a wealth transfer from bondholders to stockholders surrounding R&D increases. Neither of these results is found for firms with low default risk.

Research limitations/implications – The present study highlights the importance of assessing firm's existing default risk to understand the effects that R&D expenditures have on bondholders.

Social implications – The study reveals a potential social welfare and economic cost, as it reveals that stockholders may be able to gain wealth at the expense of bondholders.

Originality/value – The study provides important insights to bondholders on how firms’ investment policies, such as R&D expenditures, may affect their wealth.

This paper aims to investigate how stockholders and bondholders react to the information disclosed on the financial markets during crisis periods. This paper considers the 2011 European Banking Authority’s stress test as it disclosed detailed information about banks.

It was conducted during the European sovereign debt crisis, and this paper uses an event study methodology. This paper analyzes the average cumulative abnormal returns for different subsamples of banks. This paper compares the reactions of stockholders and bondholders to the stress test by considering pre-results announcements (signal generating process) to the publication of the results on the disclosure date, using quantitative data for each individual bank that participated in the stress test (the signal provided to the financial market).

This paper finds that stockholders’ reaction is more sensitive to idiosyncratic components of the disclosed information, whereas bondholders are more influenced by systematic risk. A deeper investigation shows that subordinated bondholders tend to behave quite similarly to stockholders. This specific reaction of stockholders during financial distress may make them more likely than bondholders to impose market discipline during troubled periods.

This paper brings several new insights to the behavior of stock and bond holders during times of financial distress and makes recommendations to regulators that may serve to refine communication to markets to reduce the shock of negative news.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive initial evaluation of the wealth transfer hypothesis as applied to the second‐stage events and announcements that follow carve‐outs during the period from 1983 to 2004.

Using daily security prices, such combinations are shown to have multi‐faceted wealth transfers and wealth creation.

In contrast with the wealth losses found in previous studies, wealth increases are observed for parent stockholders and bondholders in the spin‐off announcement and event phases for combination carve‐outs and spin‐offs. Also, the spin‐off is the most prevalent second divestiture choice for parents with traded debt.

This study makes several contributions to the literature. First, in contrast with recent wealth transfer studies that use monthly bond returns, daily stock and bond returns are used to examine the wealth effect for parent stockholders and bondholders during the announcement and ex‐dates of second‐stage events. Second, in contrast with previous studies that found a wealth transfer from bondholders to stockholders in the spin‐off phase, statistically significant wealth retention was observed for bondholders and for stockholders at spin‐off and other second event announcements. Third, the results reflect that increased collateral from the carve‐out phase lessens the potential for bondholder wealth loss in the spin‐off phase.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of board gender diversity on bond terms and bondholders’ returns.

The authors perform pooled OLS regression, simultaneous regressions and propensity score matching to a panel data set of bond data for 319 US firms from 2007 to 2014.

The authors find that firms with gender-diverse boards have lower yields, higher ratings, larger issue size and shorter maturity. They also find that bondholders require fewer returns from firms with gender-diverse boards. However, the effect is more pronounced when women, constitutes at least 29.67 percent of the board.

This analysis supplements the findings that board gender diversity is essential for bondholders. It shows that bondholders should look at board gender diversity as a criterion to invest because bonds issued by firms with gender-diverse board have less risk. For practitioners, this study shows that more women participation on boards leads to a reduction in borrowing costs.

Bonds governed under German law would normally not contain collective action clauses, ie provisions dealing with majority decisions by bondholders by which certain bond terms may be altered or waived. This is because it is uncertain whether, in the absence of a statutory basis, a decision taken by a majority of bondholders would be binding upon a dissenting minority. For certain circumstances, however, a statutory basis exists in the form of a law enacted in 1899 which, during the last decades, has been very rarely used. This paper discusses in what cases the law may be invoked, what decisions can be made by bondholders and what procedural requirements must be observed for getting to a binding and unchallengeable decision.

Since Jensen and Meckling [1976] first introduced the concept of an agency cost of debt, most research on the agency cost of debt has centered on who bears these costs. Jensen and Meckling's original contention was that if bondholders have rational expectations, then the owner‐manager should bear the agency costs of debt. The alternative to this explanation was first offered by Barnea, Haugen and Senbet [1981] who claimed that because of the effects of agency costs on the supply of debt, these costs would be borne by the bondholders. Roberts and Viscione [1984] extend the analysis of Barnea, Haugen, and Senbet by including costly tax avoidance on personal and corporate levels to show that the agency costs of debt are shared by bondholders and owner‐managers.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the current literature on corporate asset writedowns.

The paper explains the anomalous price responses to asset writedowns by examining both stock and bond price responses. It applies bond and stock event study methodologies using daily prices. Firms are analyzed by partitioning them according to their financial viability. This analysis is based on the logic that it is more difficult to assess the prospects of firms in financial difficulty from publicly available information.

The study reveals that while asset writedowns have no information content for stockholders of healthy firms, stockholders of financial distressed firms suffer a significant adverse effect. This differential stock price reaction provides an explanation for the anomalous results reported in previous studies. Similar price responses are found for bondholders. The results indicate that the market interprets an asset writedown announcement by a financially distressed firm as a strong negative signal about the firm's prospects. It is also found that the firm's financial health, the subordination status of the bond, the bond's maturity, the bond rating, the amount of the write‐off undertaken by a firm in distress, and the leverage change experienced by the firm are all important determinants to bond price response. Long‐run analysis reveals significant differences in performance and leverage change between healthy and financially distressed firms undertaking asset writedowns.

The paper resolves the anomalous results on information content of corporate asset writedown announcements on stockholders and bondholders. Broadly, the findings have important implications for both finance and accounting literatures in terms of semi‐strong market efficiency and security market signaling issues and the importance of considering financial viability of firms when testing market efficiency in the presence of publicly available information.

This is the first study to address this issue by examining the information content of asset writedown announcements for both stockholders and bondholders. Past studies document a significant negative stock price response to asset writedown announcements, while there is no bond price response to such official acknowledgment of asset impairment.

This article combines two sources of data to shed light on the nature of transactional legal work. The first consists of stories about contracts that circulate among elite transactional lawyers. The stories portray lawyers as ineffective market actors who are uninterested in designing superior contracts, who follow rather than lead industry standards, and who depend on governments and other outside actors to spur innovation and correct mistakes. We juxtapose these stories against a dataset of sovereign bond contracts produced by these same lawyers. While the stories suggest that lawyers do not compete or design innovative contracts, their contracts suggest the contrary. The contracts, in fact, are consistent with a market narrative in which lawyers engage in substantial innovation despite constraints inherent in sovereign debt legal work. Why would lawyers favor stories that paint them in a negative light and deny them a potent role as market actors? We conclude with some conjectures as to why this might be so.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between corporate governance (CG) and firms’ bond recovery rates (RRs). The authors hypothesize that governance features impact RRs by controlling agency costs that result from conflicts between bondholders and shareholders. The authors also test the relationship between CG and RRs during the last crisis.

The authors use a generalized method of moments regression model to test the relationship between CG and firms’ bond RRs. The authors employ a direct measure of recoveries rates from Moody’s ultimate recovery database covering the period from 2003 to 2012. Both firm-level CG and country-level variables are used to examine the determinants of corporate bonds RRs.

The results support a significant impact of CG mechanisms on bond RRs mainly during crisis period. The authors find that firms operating with CEO-Duality decrease their bond RRs during financial crisis. This implies wealth transfers from bondholders to shareholders and provides one explanation why some firms operate with weak governance.

This paper provides the first direct evidence that corporate bond RRs are directly related to CG mechanisms. The authors combine firm-level CG and country-level variables to examine the determinants of corporate bonds RRs. Earlier studies focussed on financial firm-level data and macro-economic variables. The authors also test the impact of board composition and ownership structure on bond recoveries.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of bank interventions on bond performance in relation to loan covenant violations.

This paper tests the following questions: do bondholders receive benefits from bank interventions? Is bond performance related to the probability of bank interventions? Is the turnover of a chief executive officer (CEO) associated with bank interventions and bond performance? Abnormal bond returns, the difference between bond returns and matched bond index returns are used to measure bond performance. An estimated outstanding loan balance is used to measure the probability of bank interventions. CEO turnover is identified from proxy statements and categorized into forced and voluntary CEO turnovers. Event studies and regression analysis were used to answer the above research questions.

This paper finds that both short-term and long-term bond returns increase after covenant violations, bond performance is positively related to the probability of bank interventions, forced CEO turnovers are positively associated with the probability of bank interventions and firms with forced CEO turnovers tend to have superior bond performance.

This paper is the first to explore the relation between bank interventions and bond performance.