Many corporate finance researchers have avoided analyzing financial institutions, perhaps on the grounds that they are “unique” or “different” from other types of firms. This assessment reflects some unusual features of financial firms' liabilities and a set of governmental regulatory...

We evaluate U.S. firms' leverage determinants by studying how 1,801 firms paid for 2,073 very large investments during the period 1989-2006. This approach complements existing empirical work on capital structure, which typically estimates regression models for a broad set of CRSP/Compustat...