In the past decade, many U.S. companies have launched aggressive share repurchase programs with the expectation that value can be created by returning excess capital to shareholders and moving the firm closer to its optimal capital structure. But how much capital does a company really need to...

Most academic insights about corporate capital structure decisions come from models that focus on the trade-off between the tax benefits and financial distress costs of debt financing. But empirical tests of corporate capital structure indicate that actual debt ratios are considerably different...

Most finance textbooks suggest that companies evaluate investment projects using discount rates that reflect both the debt capacity and the unique risks of the project. In practice, however, companies often use their company-wide WACC to evaluate such investments because of the difficulty of...