Previous research showed that the dividend price ratio process changed remarkably during the 1980's and 1990's, but that the total payout ratio (dividends plus repurchases over price) changed very little. We investigate implications of this difference for asset pricing models. In particular, the...

Using data spanning the 20th century, we show that most accounting-based return anomalies are spurious. When examined out-of-sample by moving either backward or forward in time, anomalies' average returns decrease, and volatilities and correlations with other anomalies increase. The...

Unregulated U.S. corporations dramatically increased their debt usage over the past century. Aggregate leverage - low and stable before 1945 - more than tripled between 1945 and 1970 from 11% to 35%, eventually reaching 47% by the early 1990s. The median firm in 1946 had no debt, but by 1970 had...

Using a novel dataset of accounting and market information that spans most publicly traded nonfinancial firms over the last century, we show that U.S. federal government debt issuance significantly affects corporate financial policies and balance sheets through its impact on investors' portfolio...

Using data from SEC filings, I show that the typical bank loan is renegotiated five times, or every nine months. The pricing, maturity, amount, and covenants are all significantly modified during each renegotiation, whose timing is governed by the financial health of the contracting parties and...

We show that the partial response of loan rates to interest rate changes, referred to in the bank lending literature as “stickiness,” is a feature of perfect capital markets. No-arbitrage models of credit risk are able to replicate empirical interest rate sensitivities. However, the...