Effects of positive jumps of assets on endogenous bankruptcy and optimal capital structure: Continuous- and periodic-observation models

Abstract

In this paper, we study the optimal capital structure model with endogenous bankruptcy when the firm's asset value follows an exponential L\'evy process with positive jumps. In the Leland-Toft framework \cite{LelandToft96}, we obtain the optimal bankruptcy barrier in the classical continuous-observation model and the periodic-observation model, recently studied by Palmowski et al.\ \cite{palmowski2019leland}. We further consider the two-stage optimization problem of obtaining the optimal capital structure. Detailed numerical experiments are conducted to study the sensitivity of the firm's decision-making with respect to the observation frequency and positive jumps of the asset value.