This study focuses on the impact of the 2001 recession as well as the subsequent expansion on U.S. trade (i.e., retail and wholesale) firms' short-term assets and liabilities. The paper also analyzes the differential effects on long-term debt and cash flow levels between retail and wholesale...

We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life cycles and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms’ balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business...

The paper applies a two-state switching regression to examine the behavior of a hypothetical portfolio of ten socially responsible equity mutual funds during the expansion and contraction phases of US business cycles between April 1991 and June 2009, based on the Carhart four-factor model, using...

There is extensive research addressing questions of optimal capital structure. Studies typically focus on estimating the appropriate level of debt and the factors associated with financial leverage. This paper addresses a slightly different question: how does a company's choice of leverage...