This paper provides a comprehensive study of deal characteristics and participants’ involvement in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) and their impact on target firms’ performance. Using a sample of 501 U.S. LBOs completed between 1986 and 2011, I find that better post-buyout operating performance are...

Over the last two decades, the number (enterprise value) of leveraged buyout transactions involving privately held targets totals more than 10,000 (over $850 billion), accounting for 46% (21%) of the worldwide leveraged buyout market. Yet the vast majority of academic studies focus on the...

We derive discount rates for depreciation and amortization tax shields resulting from asset step-ups in corporate mergers and acquisitions. By assigning all relevant sources of uncertainty for such kind of tax shields and by accounting for corporate debt it is shown that for APV valuations r*, a...

Do leveraged buyout transactions increase the chance of bankruptcy? While corporate finance theory predicts that such sharp changes in capital structure increase financial distress costs by raising the probability of bankruptcy for each company, previous studies seem to fail to find any...

Recent decades have witnessed several waves of buyout activity. We find LBOs to be a significant concern for bondholders by showing that a) intra-industry credit spreads increase upon an LBO announcement, b) yields on bonds without event risk covenants are, on average, 21bps higher than those on...

Debt, and in particular, short-term debt have the potential to discipline managers. We examine the role of the board in making financing decisions that provide this discipline. Specifically, given a firm's characteristics, we predict that stronger boards will force the firm to hold more debt and...

We find a channel through which debt holders can affect corporate transactions. We show that firms with high-debt dual holders (holders of both debt and equity of the firm) are less likely to be a target of an LBO deal because LBO is costly for debt holders. Nevertheless, if a firm with dual...

This paper investigates whether overleverage identifies companies' strategic default incentives. The results show that overlevered firms have lower equity beta than their counterparts. The strategic default option becomes more valuable when the firms are overlevered. Firms are more likely to be...

This research investigates the relationship between corporate block ownership and firm financial leverage. Corporate blockholders, which are nonfinancial firms who hold more than five percent equity in a target industrial firm, can affect the target firm's policies through their business...

Debt-type compensation (i.e., inside debt) exacerbates the divergence in risk preference between the CEO and shareholders that in turn affects the firm's capital structure decisions. An excessively risk-averse CEO uses debt that falls short of the shareholders' desired level, and is eager to...