The authors investigate a class of agency costs of debt that arise because debt financing affects the firm's incentives to use inputs efficiently. A methodology for estimating this class of costs is presented and applied to a major industry--air transport. The authors' results are consistent...

We analyze the market for corporate assets. There is an active market for corporate assets, with close to seven percent of plants changing ownership annually through mergers, acquisitions, and asset sales in peak expansion years. The probability of asset sales and whole-firm transactions is...

The authors show that risk characteristics of projects' cash flows are endogenously determined by the investment decisions of all firms in an industry. As a result, in reasonable settings, financial structures which create incentives to expropriate debtholders by increasing risk are shown not to...

Using a unique firm-level survey database covering 54 countries, we investigate the effect of financial, legal, and corruption problems on firms' growth rates. Whether these factors constrain growth depends on firm size. It is consistently the smallest firms that are most constrained. Financial...

Issue size choice and underpricing in mutual-to-stock conversions of thrifts are explained as a function of growth opportunities, perquisite consumption, and proprietary information. The authors provide evidence that thrifts with greater growth opportunities choose larger issue size and...

We develop a profit-maximizing neoclassical model of optimal firm size and growth across different industries based on differences in industry fundamentals and firm productivity. In the model, a conglomerate discount is consistent with profit maximization. The model predicts how conglomerate...

We examine the effect of industry life-cycle stages on within-industry acquisitions and capital expenditures by conglomerates and single-segment firms controlling for endogeneity of organizational form. We find greater differences in acquisitions than in capital expenditures, which are similar...

We investigate how differences in legal and financial systems affect firms' use of external financing to fund growth. We show that in countries whose legal systems score high on an efficiency index, a greater proportion of firms use long-term external financing. An active, though not necessarily...