This study extends the works of Mauer and Sarkar (2005) and Andrikopoulos (2009) by incorporating a regime-dependent earnings-based bonus into managerial compensation. Examining the individual effects of ownership shares and earnings-based bonus compensation, we find that the former provides...

This paper presents evidence that firms choose conservative financial policies partly to mitigate workers' exposure to unemployment risk. We exploit changes in state unemployment insurance laws as a source of variation in the costs borne by workers during layoff spells. We find that higher...

We present the puzzling evidence that, from 1962 to 2009, an average 10.2% of large public nonfinancial US firms have zero debt and almost 22% have less than 5% book leverage ratio. Zero-leverage behavior is a persistent phenomenon. Dividend-paying zero-leverage firms pay substantially higher...

For a large sample of 48 countries, we find robust evidence that strong creditor rights are associated with low long-term leverage across countries. We further find that strong creditor protection lowers long-term debt issuance, the extent to which investments are financed with long-term debt,...

We examine the dynamic relations between institutional ownership and a firm's capital structure. We find that a firm's leverage decreases when institutional ownership increases. This result implies that a firm reduces its debt level as institutional investors substitute for the monitoring role...

This paper examines the optimal capital structure of a firm that delegates its financing decision of a risky project to a manager who is both risk averse and regret averse. Regret aversion is characterized by a utility function that includes disutility from having chosen ex-post suboptimal...

We consider how equity holders’ bargaining power during financial distress influences the interactions between financing and investment decisions when the firm faces the upper limit of debt issuance. We obtain four results. First, weaker equity holders’ bargaining power is more likely that...

In this paper, we explore two of the most relevant theories that explain financial policy in small and medium enterprises (SMEs): pecking order theory and trade-off theory. The theoretical section provides an overview of contemporary theories of capital structure. According to the pecking order...

This paper develops a structural equilibrium model with intertemporal macroeconomic risk, incorporating the fact that firms are heterogeneous in their asset composition. Compared with firms that are mainly composed of invested assets, firms with growth options have higher costs of debt because...

We develop a model to examine the timing of investment decisions in relation to the issuance of convertible debt by firms. Our model shows that when the demand shock has higher volatility, the firm finances the investment cost with high-coupon convertible debt. We find that default occurs...