This paper studies a firm's optimal capital structure in an environment, where the firm's stock price serves as a public signal for its credit worthiness. In equilibrium, equity investors choose how much information to acquire privately, which induces a positive relation between the amount of...

Modigliani and Miller present an equity-quantity shifting equilibrating process to achieve an optimal firm value in the presence of corporate taxes. However, in the era in which they derived their various propositions regarding the relation between a firm’s value and its capital structure,...

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between stock market and banking sector development with data from 40 countries (representing 85% of global GDP) over a period of 53 years. When measured by ratios of stock market (i) capitalization to GDP; (ii) turnover to GDP; and (iii)...

Trust companies generate leverage cycle dynamics by intermediating less regulated credit to the financial markets in China. We find that the leverage factor constructed from trust companies can explain the time-series and cross-sectional asset returns. The leverage factor derived from securities...

Asymmetric volatility in equity markets has been widely documented in finance, where two competing explanations, as considered in Bekaert and Wu (2000), are the financial leverage and the volatility feedback hypothesis. We explicitly test for the role of both hypotheses in explaining extreme...

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...

This paper explores the dynamic relationship between firm debt and real outcomes using data from 24 European economies over the period of 2000-2018. Based on macro data, it shows that a rise in credit to firms is associated with an increase in employment growth in the short-term, but employment...