For corporations facing tax-function convexity, hedging lowers expected tax liabilities, thereby providing an incentive to hedge. We use simulation methods to investigate convexity induced by tax-code provisions. On average, the tax function is convex (although in approximately 25 percent of...

Monitoring by outside board members and incentive compensation provisions in executive pay packages are alternative mechanisms for controlling incentive problems between owners and managers. The control hypothesis suggests that if incentive conflicts vary materially, those firms with more...

Compelling empirical evidence documenting a material effect of corporate taxes on leverage decisions is limited, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for the firm's tax benefit of debt. We examine leverage decisions across taxable and nontaxable real estate...

We examine a vertical integration decision within the commercial banking industry. During the last quarter of the 20th century, some community banks reduced their traditional reliance on correspondent banks for upstream products and services by joining bankers' banks, a form of business...

Since the formulation of the M & M irrelevance propositions 40 years ago, financial economists have been debating whether there is such a thing as optimal capital structure-a proportion of debt to equity that maximizes current firm value. Some finance scholars have followed M & M by arguing that...

If debt capacity is defined as the incremental debt that is optimally associated with an additional asset, then the debt capacity of growth options is negative. Underinvestment costs of debt increase and free cash flow benefits of debt fall with additional growth options. Thus, if firm value...