This dissertation consists of six separate papers dealing with the valuation of financial guarantees and risky debt contract. Each of these papers is independent and distinct. The main theme is the valuation of securities by contingent claims analysis (CCA). Paper 1: Valuation of Financial Guarantees – A Presentation and a Critique.One purpose of this paper is to derive a pricing formula for a deposit guarantee, when the assets of the bank exhibit downward jumps due to extraordinary loan defaults. In this respect, we use the framework of Merton (1976), where a stock option is priced under the assumption of a jump-diffusion process for the underlying stock. Paper 2: Valuation of Deposit Insurance – An Alternative Approach.This paper extends paper 1 in the respect that the guarantor, in this case a deposit insurance agency, will nullify the guarantee contract and liquidate the bank when it gets insolvent. The liquidation is assumed to involve some costs like legal and realization costs. In fact, since the guarantee contract will never get in-the-money, the guarantee will receive value only from these liquidation costs. Paper 3: Financial Guarantees and Asymmetric Information.In this paper, we make the assumption that the guarantor cannot observe the solvency process, unless it carries out audits. This is different from the normal perfect information assumption for this kind of analysis. Since audits are often costly, and this burdens the guarantee value, the guarantor will search for an audit strategy, which minimizes the guarantee value. Paper 4: Valuation of Barrier Contracts – A Simplified Approach.Many types of financial contracts can be classified as "barrier contracts". This description comes from their feature of allowing either contractual part to take some kind of action during the lifetime of the contract contingent on some pre-specified event. In this sense, the deposit insurance contract in analysed in paper 2 can be regarded as a barrier contract. The previous valuation models of barrier contracts are often considerably advanced and have tended to obscure the underlying economics. It is the path-dependence and stopping-time features that primarily make the derivation of these pricing formulas complicated. Our model simplifies this procedure by deriving the important "first passage time" distribution from a binomial model instead of using the reflection principle. Paper 5: Valuation of Risky Debt in the Presence of Jumps, Safety Barriers and Collaterals.This paper deals with different aspects of risky debt valuation with the CCA approach. The term. "risky", refers to the probability of default on the promised payment by the borrower. Paper 6: Portfolio Selection and the Pricing of Personal Loan Contracts.The CCA literature that follows Black and Scholes (1973), has mainly taken the underlying asset dynamics for given. Although it may be appropriate for stock options, we consider this assumption too simplifying with regards to personal loan contracts. It is obvious that the borrower’s consumption-investment decision affects his wealth process, on which the loan contract is contingent. Moreover, we believe that individuals actually have preferences to repay loans for different reasons such as the existence of reputational costs or legal penalties that affect the borrower in case of loan default. / Diss. av båda förf.  Stockholm : Handelshögskolan

This dissertation consists of three essays on firm finances and macroeconomics. In Chapter 1, I empirically investigate the relationship between firms' financial positions and asset tangibility by drawing on a CRSP/Compustat merged dataset of US public firms from 1987 to 2016. Intangible capital has grown in importance as the US economy has evolved towards service-based and technology-based industries with a decline in the physical capital share. Intangible capital spending is a type of capital expenditure that is not negligible compared to physical capital investment. The key finding of my empirical exercise is that industries and firms with lower average asset tangibility have lower average debt-to-sales ratios and higher average values of distance-to-default both in the long run and short run. Asset tangibility is a proxy for the recovery rate of capital since intangible capital is considered less valuable collateral, so the empirical evidence suggests that the recovery rate of capital is related to borrowing and default. Chapter 2 structurally estimates the recovery rate of capital, which is difficult to observe in the data, and quantitatively analyzes the aggregate implications of the empirical findings in the previous chapter. The recovery rate of capital determines lenders' credit supply and affects the demand and total credit amounts in equilibrium. Recent rising intangibles in the US may reduce recovery. I build a canonical quantitative general equilibrium heterogeneous firm model with risky debt, capital accumulation, and default. I estimate the model parameters by matching the covariance matrix of profit, investment, and debt, the average spread, and the average default rate in my data sample. The simulated method of moments (SMM) estimate of the recovery rate is 74% when targeting moments constructed with only physical capital. The counterfactuals reveal that declines in the recovery rate reduce aggregate output, credit, and welfare by constraining capital accumulation. Tackling intangibles by a broader notion of capital, I estimate a recovery rate of 46% with the same model structure, implying that rising intangibles could cause nontrivial output and welfare losses due to financial frictions. Chapter 3 examines the causal effect of immigration on local entrepreneurship in US counties. I use the immigration shock constructed in Burchardi et al. (2020) as an instrumental variable to predict the total number of migrants flowing into each US county from 1990 to 2010. I use the entrepreneurship indices from the Startup Cartography Project (Andrews et al., 2020) to measure the quantity and quality of US start-ups at the county-level. First, I find a strong and significant causal impact of immigration on the number of new business registrants per person. Second, I find a significant causal impact of immigration on the expected number of start-ups with growth per person. I also show that the influx of immigrants can increase the local average wage per capita. To interpret these empirical findings, I build a model of entrepreneurship which implies that if immigration shifts the distribution of entrepreneurial acumen to the right, it increases the wage rate, the fraction of entrepreneurs, and the mean quality of entrepreneurs. These results suggest that immigration is an essential driver of economic dynamism via entrepreneurship.

This cumulative dissertation extends the literature strand on firm valuation and capital structure under distinctive fiscal considerations by elaborating on corporate finance issues that have not been resolved or not explained in their full magnitude. Essay one reassesses the appropriate valuation of a firm using the APV equation and more appropriately specifying one of its components, the value of tax savings. The second essay thematically follows essay one by utilizing the WACC approach in a multi-state setting under active debt policy. The third and final essay reconsiders capital structure under the artificial restriction of interest deductibility and its resulting influence on the value of potential tax savings. All essays incorporate loss distribution in default for either a partial or a complete loss scenario, thus providing additional insides on this crucial assumption in firm valuation under risky debt.