Strategic Debt Service
研究企业濒临破产时，股东通过支付低于原定票息来“勒索”债券持有人的行为，推导出债券和股权的闭式解，并证明这种勒索能消除杠杆的代理成本，使清算决策达到事前最优。
When a firm is close to bankrupcy, equity-holders may `blackmail' owners of bonds by paying less than the originally-contracted coupon payments. This paper develops simple, closed-form expressions for bond and equity values when such blackmail effects are present. Furthermore, we show that blackmail is optimal in the following sense. Without blackmail, leverage generates agency costs because value-maximizing equity-holders liquidate firms at output price levels other than the ex-ante optimum. However, if equity-holders can extract surplus from bond-holders through blackmail, they will actually choose to liquidate the firm at the ex ante optimal shut-down point.