type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Leverage cross-sections more than a few years apart differ markedly, with similarities evaporating as the time between them lengthens. Many firms have high and low leverage at different times, but few keep debt-to-assets ratios consistently above 0.500. Capital structure...</p>

There is an exact linear relation between expected returns and true 'betas' when the market portfolio is on the ex ante mean-variance efficient frontier but empirical research has found little relation between sample mean returns and estimated betas. A possible explanation is that market...