This paper examines international differences in banks' capital structure adjustments across a large panel of 94 countries over the period 1993 to 2007. A bank's ability to adjust its capital ratio is influenced by corporate governance, public policy, market structure, and bank regulatory...

For a large sample of 48 countries, we find robust evidence that strong creditor rights are associated with low long-term leverage across countries. We further find that strong creditor protection lowers long-term debt issuance, the extent to which investments are financed with long-term debt,...

We augment the LLSV creditor rights index with a new “restructuring index” that measures the incentives provided to creditors to grant concessions outside formal bankruptcy. We study the joint impact of the two indexes on a firm's leverage policy. We show that the two indexes have at most a...

This paper presents evidence that firms choose conservative financial policies partly to mitigate workers' exposure to unemployment risk. We exploit changes in state unemployment insurance laws as a source of variation in the costs borne by workers during layoff spells. We find that higher...

This paper studies the effect of labor protection on the relation between employee satisfaction and firm capital structure across 32 countries. The stakeholder theory of capital structure states that firms whose values are derived largely from their human capital tend to maintain a lower debt...

Davis, Haltiwanger, Handley, Lerner, Lipsius, and Miranda (2019) produce an extension to the Davis et al. collection without addressing the critical research design issues raised in Ayash and Rastad (2017) and Ayash and Rastad (2018). First and foremost, the authors misrepresent their sample as...