This study provides new stylized facts on the determinants of corporate failure and acquisition in Germany. It also offers important lessons for the design of empirical studies. We show that firms experiencing failure or acquisition are significantly different from surviving firms on a number of...

Theory posits that managerial holdings of debt (“inside debt”) align managers' incentives with those of outside debtholders. Executive pensions, which consist of ERISA-qualified rank-and-file (RAF) plans and Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans (SERPs), and other deferred compensation...

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...

Stronger creditor rights reduce credit costs and thus may allow firms to increase leverage and investments, but also increase distress costs and thus may prompt firms to lower leverage and undertake risk-reducing but unprofitable investments. Using a German bankruptcy law reform, on average, we...

Previous studies argue that takeover targets’ CEOs can use high leverage as a signal for commitment to undertaking value-enhancing projects, thus deterring the takeover attempts since the bankruptcy risk associated with high leverage can serve as an effective governance mechanism. This paper...

We find that growth type (identified by a two-way sort on firm initial market-to-book ratio and asset tangibility) can parsimoniously predict significantly dispersed and persistently distinct future leverage ratios. Growth type is persistent; growth-type-sorted cross-sections of corporate...

We find that growth type (identified by a two-way sort on firm initial market-to-book ratio and asset tangibility) can parsimoniously predict significantly dispersed and persistently distinct future leverage ratios. Growth type is persistent; growth-type-sorted cross-sections of corporate...

I use a negative exogenous shock to the ability to file shareholder initiated class action lawsuits, the passage of the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, to test the effect of the probability of being sued on a firm's capital structure. After the Act's passage, firms with the...

When predicting future leverage ratios, the explanatory power of initial residual leverage falls quickly over time, while initial standard leverage determinants retain much of their explanatory power. To make sense of this fundamental persistence, we show that growth-type (identified by a...

This study examines the impact of approximately pure capital structure change announcements on security prices (specifically on common stock, straight preferred stock, convertible preferred stock, straight debt and convertible debt). Statistically significant price adjustments in firms' common...