We demonstrate that banks play an important monitoring role in CEO succession that is not observed for other types of lenders, particularly public bondholders. There is a stronger relation between cash flow performance and forced CEO turnover for firms issuing bank debt during the year of CEO...

This article examines the relation between a borrowing firm's ownership structure and its choice of debt source using a novel data set on corporate ownership, control, and debt structures for 9,831 firms in 20 countries from 2001 to 2010. We find that the divergence between the control rights...

An existing finance theory predicts that managers of takeover targets will increase leverage to enhance managerial control which can, in turn, allow target managers to thwart a takeover attempt altogether. We find that targets significantly increase leverage, not only by issuing more debt, but...

This work analyses the effect of accruals quality in the access of firms to bank debt in a panel data of SME Spanish firms. The results show a positive association between accruals quality and bank debt, even when controlling for other determinants of bank debt and for possible endogeneity...

There is anecdotal evidence that the primary reason why managers hold cash on their balance sheets is to cover operating losses (operating shortfalls). In this paper, we rationalize this as an optimal response in a world with contract heterogeneity. Specifically, we relax the standard assumption...

Start-ups mostly have only limited internal financing. Post-entry performance should thus strongly depend on the availability of new external capital. In this study we analyze the impact of financial constraints on the performance of Swiss start-ups. Since we use cohort data, we have for some...

Compelling empirical evidence documenting a material effect of corporate taxes on leverage decisions is limited, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for the firm's tax benefit of debt. We examine leverage decisions across taxable and nontaxable real estate firms...

This paper examines the effect of accounting conservatism on firm-level investment during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that firms with less conservative financial reporting experienced a sharper decline in investment activity following...

For nearly two years, the two of us have had a running discussion of the costs and benefits of automatic stays in bankruptcy for qualified financial contracts (QFCs) such as derivatives and repurchase agreements, particularly those held by systemically important major dealer banks. Under current...

This paper explores the impact of target CEOs' retirement preferences on takeovers. Using retirement age as proxy for CEOs' private merger costs, we find strong evidence that target CEOs' preferences affect merger activity. The likelihood of receiving a successful takeover bid is sharply higher...