Using internal data of a leasing company in Germany, we examine the determinants of the probability and use of leasing by small firms. We find that small and young firms are likely to be constrained on the leasing market but use leasing to increase their debt capacity. Beyond contract- and...

The objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that in particular financially constrained firms lease a higher share of their assets to mitigate problems of asymmetric information. The assumptions are tested under a GMM framework which simultaneously controls for endogeneity problems and...

This paper develops a model with the novel feature that firms can renegotiate debt both in and outside distress. We show that this feature is crucial for debt renegotiation models to explain corporate policies and debt prices. Specifically, the model reflects empirical credit spread patterns,...

When partially inalienable managerial entrenchment is introduced to Zwiebel's 1996 model of dynamic capital structure, anticipated debt renegotiation between a higher-type manager and the creditor reduces expected firm value. Only lower-type managers can issue debt to avoid shareholder takeover

The optimal capital structure model with endogenous bankruptcy was first studied by Leland (1994) and Leland and Toft (1996), and was later extended to the spectrally negative Levy model by Hilberink and Rogers (2002) and Kyprianou and Surya (2007). This paper incorporates scale effects by...

This paper shows that asymmetric information about the timing of earnings can affect corporate capital structure. It sheds new light on the following issues: why profitable firms may be interested in issuing equity and why debt does not necessarily signal a firm's quality. These issues seem to...

We study the differences in the allocation of cash flow between Western European private and public firms. Public firms have a significantly higher investment-cash flow sensitivity than comparable private firms. These differences in investment-cash flow sensitivities are not due to more...

In this paper, we adapt a continuous-time agency model to incorporate the loss-aversion preferences of agents. To this end, by distinguishing between the gains in capital and income driven by variations in the agent's continuation payoff, we provide a theoretical model which overcomes the...

Traditional pecking-order theory (POT) cannot explain why good-quality firms issue equity: this is often considered to be an empirical puzzle. We build a model of capital structure that has elements of both asymmetric information and behavioral finance. Firms have private information about their...

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...