We test one of the main predictions of the financial flexibility paradigm that expectations about future firm-specific shocks affect the firm's leverage. We extract the expectations of small and large future shocks from the market prices of equity options. We find that expectations for future...

We test one of the main predictions of the financial flexibility paradigm, that expectations about future firm-specific investment shocks affect the firm's leverage. We extract the expectations of small and large future shocks from the market prices of equity options. We find that leverage...

We explore the effect of financial development on corporate capital structure and the tightness of financial constraints that firms face. We employ an econometric technique which allows us to explicitly test for convergence in capital structure. This technique increases the power of our...