We examine the nature of impact of national culture on bank leverage using a broad sample of 1,701 banks from 79 countries, over the period 2000-2013, i.e., 18,996 bank-year observations. We find that banks in countries with high individualism culture dimensions hold more leverage while, banks...

We examine the empirical relation between labor unions and firm indebtedness in the contemporary United States. Our identification strategy exploits two negative exogenous shocks in union power and the threat of unionization. Further, in the context of panel regressions, we develop a novel...

We study the effects of uncertainty on corporate leverage adjustments with respect to investment spikes and find that overlevered and underlevered firms behave very differently in response to the combination of uncertainty and investment spikes. Overlevered firms facing high uncertainty converge...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of leverage deviation (i.e., actual minus target optimal leverage) on the implied cost of equity capital. Our special focus is on whether (and to what extent) the sensitivity of the cost of equity to leverage deviation, influences the speed with which firms...

We examine whether and to what extent business shocks explain the puzzling instabilities of corporate leverage. We find that business shocks explain a large portion of the unexplained leverage deviation, cross-sectional leverage position migration, and evaporating leverage similarities in the...

This paper extends our knowledge of corporate debt maturity structure by examining whether and to what extent overconfident CEOs affect maturity decisions. Consistent with a demand side story, we find that firms with overconfident CEOs tend to adopt a shorter debt maturity structure by using a...