Nonbank mortgage companies (NMCs) use high levels of short-term leverage, leading to concerns about their individual fragility and systemic risk. We find that NMCs also hold very risky assets, with revenue growth ranging from -30% to +100% at the 10th-90th percentile. Surprisingly, we also...

Sell-side analysts play an important role in propagating corporate capital structure choices across firms. Using exogenous characteristics of analyst network peers as well as the “friends-of-friends” approach from the network effects literature to identify peer effects, we find that...

Using the staggered introduction of fast-track debt recovery courts in India, we estimate the causal effect of a reduction in debt contract enforcement costs on financing and asset maturity. A reduction in enforcement costs is associated with an increase in long-term debt and a decrease in...

We examine whether a firm's debt maturity structure affects its credit quality. Consistent with theory, we find that firms with greater exposure to rollover risk (measured by the amount of long-term debt payable within a year relative to assets) have lower credit quality; long-term bonds issued...