In this paper, I examine public and private firms' leverage choices using the Capital IQ database. I find that private firms' leverage is about 3.8 higher than that of public firms. I also find that asset tangibility has a much larger impact on the leverage decisions of private firms than it...

We study the impact of covenant violations on credit access for privately-held and publicly-traded firms, using a rich supervisory dataset of syndicated loans from 2006-2012. Leveraging the unique information on covenant compliance, collateral and default risk in the data, we show that banks are...