This paper examines the impact of agency conicts on corporate nancing decisions. Werst build a dynamic contingent claims model in which nancing policy results from a trade-obetween tax benets, contracting frictions, and agency conicts. In our setting, partially-entrenched managers set the rms'...

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of non-financial firms' liquid assets and industry-level uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that as industry-level uncertainty increases the firm will increase its optimal...

While the negative qualitative relation between the cost of debt capital and firm age is rather well established in the financial economics literature, there are few, if any, quantitative estimates available of the magnitude of the age effect. This study analyses this effect by utilizing a large...

The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented slump caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This systemic risk like no other at a time of record-breaking debt levels, especially among nonfinancial firms across the world, could exacerbate corporate vulnerabilities, deepen macro-financial...

We derive and develop a simple and intuitive model that shines fresh light on the relentless debate over whether corporate ownership converges to the Berle-Means modern corporation with high stock ownership dispersion. Our model takes into account the importance of both protective legal...

We study the efficiency of capital allocations at state-controlled and privately owned business groups in China. Using highly granular data on within-group capital transfers, we document stark differences: while private groups allocate more capital to units with better investment opportunities,...

We study the efficiency of capital allocations at state-controlled and privately owned business groups in China. Using highly granular data on within-group capital transfers, we document stark differences: while private groups allocate more capital to units with better investment opportunities,...

This paper aims to shed light on the alleged contradiction between the observed conglomerate discount and a value creating effect of diversification itself. For this reason, we apply endogenous switching regressions on a sample of 51,878 US-firm years recorded over the years 1992-2012 in order...

Corporate leverage responds differently to employees' rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees' rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series,...

Seasonalities in asset returns, including the January effect, the Halloween effect and the same-calendar-month effect, are widely documented in the literature. We show that a number of popular factors in the empirical asset pricing literature exhibit some well-known seasonalities. Most of the...