Snow and Leverage / Xavier Giroud, Holger M. Mueller, Alex Stomper, Arne Westerkamp.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Giroud, Xavier.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Mueller, Holger M.

Stomper, Alex.

Westerkamp, Arne.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w16497.

NBER working paper series no. w16497

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2010.

Summary:

Using a sample of highly (over-)leveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings, we show that reducing a debt overhang leads to a significant improvement in operating performance (return on assets, net profit margin). In particular, a reduction in leverage leads to a decrease in overhead costs, wages, and input costs, and to an increase in sales. Changes in leverage in the debt restructurings are instrumented with <i>Unexpected Snow</i>, which captures the extent to which a ski hotel experienced unusually good or bad snow conditions prior to the debt restructuring. Effectively, <i>Unexpected Snow</i> provides lending banks with the counterfactual of what would have been the ski hotel's operating performance in the absence of strategic default, thus allowing to distinguish between ski hotels that are in distress due to negative demand shocks ("liquidity defaulters") and ski hotels that are in distress due to debt overhang ("strategic defaulters").

Notes:

Print version record

October 2010.