This paper shows that long debt maturities eliminate equityholders' incentives to reduce leverage when the firm performs poorly. By contrast, short debt maturities commit equityholders to such leverage reductions. However, shorter debt maturities also lead to higher transactions costs when...

EBITDA is a commonly-used performance measure for (1) valuation, (2) debt contracting, and (3) executive compensation. The widespread use of EBITDA by stakeholders may induce managers to focus their attention on EBITDA. Since EBITDA excludes various expenses, managers who fixate on EBITDA may...

We use a multitude of tax reforms across OECD countries as natural experiments to estimate the market value of the tax benefits of debt financing. We report time-series evidence that tax reforms are followed by large changes in the value of corporate equity. However, the impact of tax reforms is...

Admati, Demarzo, Hellwig, and Pfleiderer (ADHP, 2018) note that static models of optimal leverage have assumed firms have no prior debt. In this case, the leverage that maximizes firm value also maximizes value to the initial equity owners. However, using a simple two-period model with zero...

This paper studies leverage dynamics when managers cannot commit to future financing and default policies ex-ante. Managers derive private benefits of control but debt constrains their flexibility, and thus, they build up less excessive leverage and may even actively reduce debt over time....

The “low risk anomaly” refers to the empirical pattern that apparently high-risk equities do not earn commensurately high returns. In this paper, we consider the possibility that the risk anomaly represents mispricing, not a misspecification of risk, and develop the implications for...

This paper provides empirical evidence of a clientele effect between institutional holdings and debt maturity structure. Using a new measure of debt maturity that captures the refinancing and underinvestment risks associated with the timing of cash flows, I find that institutional equity holders...

We examine how owners’ portfolio diversification influences their firms’ financial decision-making and performance. We find that firms with high local ownership use less leverage, but firms with local ownership by locally biased owners use higher debt levels relative to firms with...

We study how the relative availability of bond and bank financing supply affects the firm's ability to borrow and to use its leverage to buffer shocks. We define a measure that proxies for the regional borrowing inflexibility in the availability of bank and bond financing: “debt...