This paper examines why some firms have no debt in their capital structures despite the potential benefits of debt financing. It adds new insights to this zero-leverage phenomenon by addressing two unexplored questions: Does a firm have zero leverage as a consequence of financial constraints or...

We employ dynamic threshold partial adjustment models to study the asymmetries in firms' adjustments toward their target leverage. Using a sample of US firms over the period 2002–2012, we document a negative impact of the Global Financial Crisis on the speed of leverage adjustment. In our...

We use a World Bank survey data on the financing of incremental production to examine firms’ debt choice decision in eleven African countries, where capital markets are evolving and/or fraught with inadequate institutional infrastructure. Such a landscape suggests that hitherto overlooked...

This paper investigates the effect of political patronage on firms' capital structure. The evidence is from Malaysia, a country characterised by relationship-capitalism, and covers 1988 to 2009. Using a system GMM estimator we find firms set leverage targets and adjust towards them following...

This study examines the role played by credit ratings in explaining corporate capital structure choice during a period characterised by a major adverse loan supply shock. Recent literature has argued that supply-side factors are potentially as important as demand-side forces in determining...

In this paper we examine how financial constraints, especially fluctuations in the supply of credit, affect the capital structure of 1537 publicly listed Japanese firms from 1980 to 2007, in a data set with 33,000 observations. It is one of the first studies to do so and is inspired by the...

This paper explores the importance of supply of capital for corporate financing. To identify this relation, we examine the impact of two exogenous events, entry to the EU and the adoption of Euro, which caused shifts in equity and credit markets during European integration. Following membership...

Because of differences in accrued gains and investors' tax-sensitivity, capital gains "lock-in" varies across mutual funds even for the same stock at the same time. Using this variation, we show that tax lock-in affects funds' governance decisions. Higher tax lock-in decreases the likelihood a...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

Thomas Piketty's monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century has transported us to a higher understanding of historical movements in inequality. This essay ranks the promise of different paths that scholars can usefully follow from the point to which his book has guided us. The main path to...