High-yield debt including leveraged loans is characterized by incurrence financial covenants, or "cov-lite" provisions. A traditional loan agreement includes maintenance covenants, which require continuous compliance with the covenant threshold, and their violation shifts the control rights to...

We explore the consequences of global capital market segmentation by currency for the optimal currency composition of borrowing by firms. Global bond portfolios are driven by the currency of denomination of assets as investors prefer to lend in their home currency or the international currency,...

We provide new evidence that debt creates shareholder value for firms that face agency costs. Our tests are unique in two respects. First, we focus on a sample of firms with potentially extreme agency problems. We study emerging market firms where the routine use of pyramid ownership structures...

In this paper we explore the conjecture that the periodic episodes of high prices and constrained supply in the property- casualty industry are the result of temporary capital shortages. We do this by looking for increases in activities aimed at increasing capital at these times: dividend cuts,...

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the costs and benefits of internal vs. external capital allocation. We focus primarily on comparing an internal capital market to bank lending. While both represent centralized forms of financing, in the former case the financing is owner-provided,...

We develop a theory of optimal capital structure based on the idea that debt and equity differ in their priority status relative to future corporate cash pants. A company with high (dispersed) debt will find it hard to raise new capital since new security-holders will have low priority relative...

The U.S. corporate tax distorts the behavior of both real and financial decisions. With respect to the former, the variation in depreciation allowances and investment tax credit provisions across types of investments leads to widely vazying effective tax rates, especially since 1981. Financial...

The study is divided into four broad parts, beginning with an exploratory analysis of the data on expost returns on corporate equities and bonds for the 1926-80 period. In Part 2, we estimate the relationships between one-month expost returns on corporate bonds and equities andvariations in...

This paper is a cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between common stock price reactions to announcements of convertible security calls and variables that represent possible determinants of changes in common stockholders' wealth. The variables are measures of the following effects of...

This paper investigates empirically the degree of substitutability between debt and equity securities in the United States during 1960-1980. The analysis first applies fundamental relationships connecting portfolio choices with expected asset returns to infer key asset substitutabilities...