The Cost of Intermediary Market Power for Distressed Borrowers

We thank our discussants Fernando Anjos, Samuel Antill, William Mann, Marcus Opp, Zhongzhi Song, Arthur Taburet, Alessandro Villa, Jonathan Wallen, Yufeng Wu, and Haotian Xiang, for their suggestions and comments. We are grateful for comments from Dean Corbae, Darrell Duffie, Brent Glover, Itay Goldstein, John Griffin, Zhiguo He, Edie Hotchkiss, Jean-François Houde, Ben Iverson, Lars- Alexander Kuehn, Karen Lewis, David Musto, Mitchell Petersen, Tom Sargent, Lukas Schmid, Amit Seru, Adi Sunderam, Chad Syverson, Luke Taylor, Toni Whited, Liyan Yang, conference participants at AFA, BI Norwegian Business School, BPI and Nova SBE Conference in Corporate Bankruptcy and Restructuring, CityU International Finance Conference, Econometric Society Summer School in Dynamic Structural Econometrics, Macro Finance Society Workshop, MFA, NFA, PHBS Finance Symposium, Stanford SITE, Summer Institute of Finance (SIF), Wisconsin (Economics), WFA, and seminar participants at Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, Dauphine-PSL Paris, Indiana University, HKUST, Sargent Alumni Reading Group, Temple University, University of Georgia, and Wharton. We thank Edward I. Altman for kindly sharing the NYU-Salomon Center Default database. We acknowledge the funding support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Winston Dou is grateful for financial support from the Golub Faculty Scholar Award at Wharton. Wenyu Wang gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Peter Chair in Investment Banking. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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• May 13, 2026