We provide evidence on leverage and debt maturity targeting in a large international setting. There are key differences in the relative importance of institutional factors in explaining actual as opposed to target capital structures. Targets and target deviations are plausibly influenced by the...

US states have implemented lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. We assess the impact of state policy responses on local economic and health conditions, with the goal to shed light on marginal health benefits and economic costs associated with social distancing. We find that...

This research analyzes the determinants of capital structure across 37 countries. Institutional arrangements matter for capital structure decisions; however, firm-level covariates drive two-thirds of the variation in capital structure across countries, while the country-level covariates explain...

Political environment is an important determinant of financial intermediation costs, which eventually affects the external financing patterns of firms. Political gyrations create policy uncertainty, which increases the information risk, weakens the investor demand, and reduces the offer size....

Using a broad range of uncertainty measures, we show that uncertainty dramatically slows down firms' adjustments toward their optimal capital structure. At the upper bound, the estimated speed of leverage adjustments almost halves when uncertainty is high. High quality institutions (common law...

US states have implemented lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. We assess the impact of state policy responses on local economic and health conditions, with the goal to shed light on marginal health benefits and economic costs associated with social distancing. We find that...

We provide evidence on leverage and debt maturity targeting in a large international setting. There are key differences in the relative importance of institutional factors in explaining actual as opposed to target capital structures. Targets and target deviations are plausibly influenced by the...

U.S. states have implemented lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. We assess the impact of state policy responses on local economic and health conditions, with the goal to shed light on marginal health benefits and economic costs associated with social distancing. We find that...

This study examines financing behavior during financial crises in an international sample of corporate firms including 85 countries from 1987 to 2017. Measuring “financial cyclicality” as the difference between financing levels during normal times and financial crisis times, we document...

We find that equity mispricing impacts the speed at which firms adjust to their target leverage and does so in predictable ways depending on whether the firm is over- or underlevered. For example, firms that are above their target leverage and should therefore issue equity (or retire debt),...