Philip Valta

Philip Valta is Professor of Finance and Director of the Institute for Financial Management at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He maintains an active research program in corporate finance with significant contributions to understanding debt markets, strategic default behavior, and the relationship between product market competition and financial decisions. His work has been published in premier finance journals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Management Science.

Valta's research spans several interconnected domains in finance. His early work established how product market competition affects corporate financing costs and debt structures across different institutional environments. He extended this research to examine strategic default behavior and its implications for equity risk across international markets. A substantial portion of his scholarship investigates debt structure choices, revealing how firms select between bonds and bank loans based on credit supply conditions and competitive pressures. More recently, he has expanded into political finance, examining corporate political contributions and self-funding of political campaigns.

His publication record shows consistent high-impact research from 2008 through 2025, with recent work focusing on contemporary issues such as zombie firms, offshoring effects on firm boundaries, and valuation mistakes in mergers. Valta frequently collaborates with leading finance scholars including François Derrien, Laurent Frésard, and Erwan Morellec, maintaining strong connections within the international finance research community. His research combines theoretical modeling with rigorous empirical analysis using both U.S. and international datasets to test hypotheses across diverse institutional settings.