We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model provides a “lookalike” Modigliani-Miller equation that predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is...

We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a dynamic trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is above or below its target leverage. We provide...

This paper studies the relationship between investment volatility, capital structure, and cash levels. Our evidence suggests: i) firms with relatively high realizations of future investment volatility hold relatively low levels of debt and high levels of cash, ii) firms fund large investment by...

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 revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a dynamic trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is above or below its target leverage. We provide...

We investigate the informational content of credit default swap (CDS) spreads for future volatility of (firm) assets and equity. In the cross-section, CDS spreads are significantly more informative about future asset than equity volatility. The informational content of historical and option...