Most firms deleverage from their historical peak market-leverage (ML) ratios to near-zero ML, while also markedly increasing cash balances to high levels. Among 4,476 nonfinancial firms with five or more years of post-peak data, median ML is 0.543 at the peak and 0.026 at the later trough, with...

The introduction of the 2006 Norwegian shareholder income tax was announced in advance, and it increased top marginal tax rates on individual dividend income from zero to 28 percent. We document strong timing effects on dividend payout on a large panel of non-listed corporations, with a surge of...

The aim of this paper is to examine the effect of corporate governance, corporate financing decision, and ownership structure on firm performance. The study uses panel based regression approach; the analysis is based on a sample of 80 listed Kuwait Stock Exchange Market firms, over a period of 9...

I provide further evidence on the determinants of corporate capital structure by estimating a dynamic trade-off model of the firm that includes investment, leverage, and payout decisions. The structural model generates a leverage ratio that oscillates around a long-run, time-invariant level and...

This paper provides new evidence on how the largest nonfinancial firms actively manage the composition of their financial assets. We construct a novel hand-collected panel dataset to document their financial portfolio dynamics. Over the past decade, bond portfolios have grown to be at least as...

We follow the financing choices over time of established companies with initial high profitability and low leverage, company by company. The behaviour of most suggests preference for low leverage or indifference to leverage so long as it is not excessive (debt/assets above 50%). Companies lever...

I develop a hypothesis that predicts nonlinear patterns of leverage and cash holdings over firms' financial flexibility demand stages. The hypothesis also predicts distinctive financing patterns over the financial flexibility demand stages. The empirical results support the hypothesis:...

A recent dramatic rise in the assets managed by passive corporate debt funds has profound implications for firm financing and payout policy. I use fund-specific flows to isolate exogenous increases in firm-level passive debt ownership at a firm. Firms respond to higher levels of passive debt...

Prior to 2018, U.S. repatriation taxes motivated companies to retain cash offshore. Using confidential jurisdiction-specific data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we find that firms with high tax-induced foreign cash have approximately 3.3 percent higher domestic liabilities relative to...

This paper develops a model with the novel feature that firms can renegotiate debt both in and outside distress. We show that this feature is crucial for debt renegotiation models to explain corporate policies and debt prices. Specifically, the model reflects empirical credit spread patterns,...