Examining a unique panel dataset of 22,076 firm-year observations for China's coalmining industry, we find that a firm's leverage significantly determines its coalmining fatality. We show, specifically, that leverage reduces a firm's safety investment and, hence, causes more fatalities. Our...

We conjecture that leverage has the potential to explain the positive relation between stock returns and gross profitability (Novy-Marx, 2013). At the firm level, we show that the profitability premium becomes insignificant for almost zero-leverage firms (Strebulaev and Yang, 2013). At the...