This paper examines the effects of country-level governance—such as voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption—on the capital structure and investment financing decisions of firms. The full sample...

We examine the nature of impact of national culture on bank leverage using a broad sample of 1,701 banks from 79 countries, over the period 2000-2013, i.e., 18,996 bank-year observations. We find that banks in countries with high individualism culture dimensions hold more leverage while, banks...

We empirically investigate the effect of corporate culture on capital structure policy. This paper uses CEO replacement to identify change in corporate culture. We focus on firms that change their debt policy from zero leverage to positive leverage or from positive leverage to zero leverage at...

There are two main sources of confusion in the public corporate governance debate. One is the confusion about the role of public policy intervention. The other is a lack of empirical knowledge about the corporate landscape where rules are supposed to be implemented and the functioning of...

We examine whether the effect of increased creditor rights on corporate borrowing depends on firm's access to internal capital. By exploiting a creditor protection reform in India, empirical outcomes strongly indicate that strengthening of creditor rights leads to increased corporate borrowing...

Market imperfections such as taxes, asymmetric information and agency problems make capital structure decisions relevant to the value of the firm. More specially, the agency theory suggests that debt financing is one of the governance mechanisms to mitigate agency costs of equity capital and...

Exploiting the staggered adoption of anti-recharacterization laws across various U.S. states as quasi-exogenous shocks to secured lenders' ability to repossess assets in bankruptcy, we find that the strengthening of creditor rights is associated with a significant decrease in the cost of equity...

Corporate capital structure decisions are key determinants of firm performance. The agency theory suggests that debt financing is one of the mechanisms to mitigate agency problems and thus to improve firm performance. This paper provides important evidence on the performance effects of capital...

The paper investigates the influence of firm-level corporate governance on the capital structure pattern of non-financial listed firms using Bangladesh's case study. The agency theory suggests that better corporate governance will reduce agency costs and improve investors' confidence, which in...

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...