We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life cycles and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms’ balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business...

The recent macro monetary policy debate over the existence of bank lending channels focuses on short-term bank borrowing versus short-term non-bank borrowing by firms. The approach is macro using aggregate manufacturing corporation data from the QFR of the US Census Bureau. In the present paper,...

Micro industrial firm panel data on short-term and long-term borrowing (term debt structure) for annual and quarterly time periods over the years 1995-2008 are used to test an insulation hypothesis and a related volatility hypothesis. The former test uses a regression model relating the ratio of...

Some multinationals use the parent company as a lender to the group, whereas others set up an internal bank in a low tax jurisdiction. This paper discusses the link between capital structure choices and tax planning motives in multinational groups. We model the trade-off between the use of...