This paper develops a structural equilibrium model with intertemporal macroeconomic risk, incorporating the fact that firms are heterogeneous in their asset composition. Compared with firms that are mainly composed of invested assets, firms with growth options have higher costs of debt because...

This paper develops a dynamic trade-off model of optimal capital structure that takes into ac- count the fact that most firms have both invested assets and growth opportunities. These two sources of value react quite differently to business cycle risk. In particular, growth options are more...

We empirically examine the influence of risk on firms' capital structure adjustments. The process of adjustment is asymmetric and depends on the type of risk, its magnitude, the firm's actual leverage with respect to its target, and its financial status. We show that firms with financial...

The fall in US macroeconomic volatility from the mid-1980s coincided with a strong rise in asset prices. Recently, this rise, and the crash that followed, have been attributed to overconfidence in a benign macroeconomic environment of low volatility. This paper introduces learning about the...

This doctoral thesis develops regime-switching models of the term structure of interest rates. A general framework is proposed to model the joint dynamics of yield curves associated with different debtors (Chapter 2). This framework is exploited to analyse the fluctuations of ten euro-area...

Stock prices often diverge from measures of fundamental value, which simple present value models fail to explain. This paper tries to find causes for these long-run price movements and their persistence by estimating a STAR model for the price-earnings ratio of the S&P500 index for 1961Q1 -...

This paper presents a no-arbitrage model of the yield curve that explicitly incorporates the central-bank policy rate. After having estimated the model using daily euro-area data, I explore the behaviour of risk premia at the short end of the yield curve. These risk premia are neglected by the...

Some advocates of far higher capital requirements for banks invoke the Modigliani-Miller theorem as grounds for judging that associated costs would be minimal. The M&M theorem holds that the average cost of capital to the firm is independent of capital structure, because any reduction in capital...

Conventional wisdom on capital structure choices has been by and large confined to the United States and a few advanced countries having institutional similarities. In this paper we make an attempt to provide some insight into the capital structure choice of developing countries through a case...