Peers' valuation matters for firms' investment: a one standard deviation increase in peers' valuation is associated with a 5.9% increase in corporate investment. This association is stronger when a firm's stock price informativeness is lower or when its managers appear less informed. Also, the...

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...

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'...

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager-shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. Using panel data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we show that while refinancing costs help explain the...

There are noticeable differences between the roles that various forms of credit financing play in family businesses and in other businesses. Family businesses take out more often bank loans specifically to finance investments and innovations, and they particularly often resort to the short-term...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

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...

This article examines the impact of the divergence between corporate insiders' control rights and cash-flow rights on firms' external finance constraints via generalized method of moments estimation of an investment Euler equation. Using a large sample of U.S. firms during the 1994–2002...

We evaluate the influence of measurement error in analysts' forecasts on the accuracy of implied cost of capital estimates from various implementations of the ‘implied cost of capital' approach, and develop corrections for the measurement error. We document predictable error in the implied...

We demonstrate a link between the twin storms underlying the current financial crisis - the market for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and the market for leveraged loans. We show that structural changes in credit markets that led to the explosion in CDOs created an increased supply of...