This paper examines the effect of earnings management on financial leverage and how this relation is influenced by institutional environments by employing a large panel of 25,798 firms across 37 countries spanning the years 1989 to 2009. We find that firms with high earnings management...

Surprisingly little is known about the business cycle dynamics of leverage. The existing evidence documents that target leverage evolves pro-cyclically either for all firms or financially constrained ones. In contrast, we show that, on average, target leverage ratios evolve counter-cyclically...

We study a continuous-time dynamic capital structure model in which a firm can continuously adjust its capital structure. Unlike previous models, we assume heterogeneous equity and debt holders and segmented equity and debt markets. We show that the expected future equity and debt market...

Private benefits of control distort the risk choices of owner-managers. In particular, when riskier projects entail a larger increase in cash flow than in private benefits (if successful), (more) equity financing renders the owner-manager (more) conservative, which lowers both expected payoff...

This paper examines the effect of firm crash-risk exposure on the speed of leverage adjustment (SOA), and how this effect is influenced by information environments, by employing a large panel of 19,254 firms across 39 countries spanning the years 1989 to 2009. We find that firms exposed to a...

This paper examines the effect of organization capital on corporate debt structure. We find that firms with higher organization capital rely more on unsecured debt. Using state-level unemployment insurance benefits and industry median organization capital as instrumental variables, we identity...

Using a large sample of firms from 43 markets, we find significant time-series variations in firms’ leverage ratios around the world. Industry median leverage ratios and aggregate leverage ratios also change substantially over time. Relative to actual leverage ratios, target leverage ratios...