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Costs Of Financial Distress, Delayed Calls Of Convertible Bonds, And The Role Of Investment Banks

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Dwight Jaffee
Andrei Shleifer

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Abstract

In a frictionless market with perfect information, a shareholder-wealth- maximizing firm should force conversion of its convertible bond issue into stock as soon as the bond comes in-the-money. Firms however appear to systematically delay forced conversion, sometimes for years, beyond this time. We show that the observed delays can be plausibly explained in terms of costs to shareholders of a failed conversion and the ensuing financial distress. Firms delay the forced conversion to avoid the self-fulfilling outcome that bondholders expect the conversion to fail, tender their bonds for cash, and the stock price falls to account for the costs of financial distress, in which case tendering for cash is in fact optimal. Unlike other explanations of delayed forced conversion, we can explain the common use of investment banks to underwrite these transactions, since the banks can eliminate the self-fulfilling bad outcome.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 2558.

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Date of creation: Apr 1988
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2558

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Mikkelson, Wayne H., 1981. "Convertible calls and security returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 237-264, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Kyle, Albert S, 1985. "Continuous Auctions and Insider Trading," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 53(6), pages 1315-35, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Shleifer, Andrei, 1986. " Do Demand Curves for Stocks Slope Down?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(3), pages 579-90, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Warner, Jerold B, 1977. "Bankruptcy Costs: Some Evidence," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 32(2), pages 337-47, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Dann, Larry Y. & Mikkelson, Wayne H., 1984. "Convertible debt issuance, capital structure change and financing-related information : Some new evidence," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 157-186, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. David M. Cutler & Lawrence H. Summers, 1988. "The Costs of Conflict Resolution and Financial Distress: Evidence from the Texaco-Pennzoil Litigation," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 19(2), pages 157-172, Summer. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  7. Harris, Milton & Raviv, Artur, 1985. " A Sequential Signalling Model of Convertible Debt Call Policy," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(5), pages 1263-81, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  1. Asquith, Paul, 1948-, 1992. "Convertible debt--a dynamic test of call policy," Working papers 3413-92., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management. [Downloadable!]
  2. Jeremy C. Stein, 1992. "Convertible Bonds as "Back Door" Equity Financing," NBER Working Papers 4028, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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