Is There a Corporate Debt Crisis?

Is There a Caring Crisis?

Is there a crisis in clinical consultations?

At medical school and beyond, a great deal of training focuses on the clinical consultation. There is a vast literature devoted to the subject. Thousands of medical educators worldwide spend their time inculcating good consulting skills in students and trainees. Yet we pay surprisingly little attention to the real-life conditions in which consultations actually take place. These are often far f...

Is There a Crisis in Generative Linguistics?

The claim is not just that one finds questionable examples in linguistics papers, but that lax data-collection standards have led to the growth of theories that are based upon bogus data. If these charges stick, then we face a genuine crisis. In order for there to be a crisis, however, it would need to be the case that (i) Intuitive judgments have led to generalizations that are widely accepted...

Granularity of Corporate Debt∗

We study whether firms spread out debt maturity dates, which we call “granularity of corporate debt.” In our model, firms that are unable to roll over expiring debt need to liquidate assets. If multiple small asset sales are less inefficient than a single large one, it can be optimal to diversify debt rollovers across time. Using a large sample of corporate bond issuers during the 1991–2012 per...

Corporate Debt Maturity Profiles ∗

We study a novel aspect of a firm’s capital structure, namely the profile of its debt maturity dates. In a simple theoretical framework we show that the dispersion of debt maturities constitutes an important dimension of capital structure choice, driven by firm characteristics and debt rollover risk. Guided by these results we establish two main empirical results. First, using an exogenous shoc...