We propose a simple idea that corporate debt maturity should serve as a good indicator of future firm performance volatility. We show in a simple two-period model that the riskiness of corporate investment is a decreasing function of corporate debt maturity. If “observable” corporate debt...

We show that firms in industries in which firm-specific stock price variation is larger use more external financing and allocate capital with greater precision in the sense that their marginal q ratios are closer to one. According to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, greater firm-specific stock...

In an approach analogous to Rajan and Zingales (1998), we examine how the ability to access long-term debt affects firm-level growth volatility. We find that firms in industries with stronger preference to use long-term finance relative to short-term finance experience lower growth volatility in...