The paper provides review of Modigliani-Miller capital structure irrelevance proposition and its development since 1958. The paper suggests some pedagogical insights and introduce risk-shifting interpretations of the MM model. We also discuss shapes of cost of debt and cost of equity functions...

This paper analyzes interdependence of three financial policies, investment decision, financing decision, and dividend policy. Interdependent relationship between the three has been extensively debated within literature of finance. While many studies have been conducted to normal economic...

Leverage cross sections more than a few years apart differ markedly, with similarities evaporating as the time between cross sections lengthens. Many firms have high and low leverage at different times, but few keep debt-to-assets ratios consistently above 0.500. Capital-structure stability is...

We estimate a dynamic investment model in which firms finance with equity, cash, or debt. Misvaluation affects equity values, and firms optimally issue and repurchase overvalued and undervalued shares. The funds flowing to and from these activities come from investment, dividends, or net cash....

This paper provides a compact summary of the evidence on capital structure instability and a case-based exploratory investigation of sources of such instability. Substantial instability in capital structure is the norm at publicly held nonfinancial firms. Firm-specific episodes of leverage...

We quantify the importance of collateral versus taxes for firms' capital structures. We estimate a dynamic contracting model in which a firm seeks financing and is subject to taxation. In the model, collateral constraints arise endogenously. Optimal leverage stays a safe distance from the...

I show that the risk of incurring large employee departure-related costs, unrelated to trade secret-related costs, impacts firms' capital structure decisions. I proxy for these costs with the cross-industry labor mobility of a firm's workers using a novel dynamic textual measure for this...

In this paper Modigliani and Miller's risk class including only one type of firm to date, namely a non-net investing firm, is supplemented by a second type of firm, namely a net investing firm. One main result of the paper is the derivation of the Gordon and Shapiro growth formula within the...

Textbook theory assumes that firm managers maximize the net present value of future cash flows. But when you ask them, real-world firm managers consistently say that they are maximizing something else entirely: earnings per share (EPS). Perhaps this is a mistake. No matter. We take firm managers...

Textbook theory assumes that firm managers maximize the net present value of future cash flows. But when you ask them, the people running large public corporations say that they are maximizing something else entirely: earnings per share (EPS). Perhaps this is a mistake. No matter. We take...