"This study examines the influence of institutional environment on capital structure and debt maturity choices by examining a cross-section of firms in 39 developed and developing countries. We find that a country's legal and tax system, the level of corruption and the preferences of capital...

"Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings are safer and should have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive and higher for lower credit ratings. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary motive for...

We quantify agency conflicts induced by the separation of ownership and control in large public firms by means of structural estimation. We use a simulated method of moments estimator (SMM) to back out the structural parameters of a q-theoretic dynamic agency model of firms from observed...