The median U.S. non-regulated firm reports a 47 percent decline in leverage ratio between 1980 and 2010. We investigate whether the cost-benefit tradeoff to shareholders, captured by the valuation impact of an additional dollar of debt on owners' equity, is an explanation for the observed change...

Customers are the most important assets of most companies, such that customer equity has been used as a proxy for shareholder value. However, linking customer metrics to shareholder value without considering debt and non-operating assets ignores their effects on relative changes in customer...

I use a negative exogenous shock to the ability to file shareholder initiated class action lawsuits, the passage of the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, to test the effect of the probability of being sued on a firm's capital structure. After the Act's passage, firms with the...

We study the impact of Dead Hand Proxy Puts on shareholder value. Courts and commentators have characterized these terms as defenses against hedge fund activism that threaten to reduce firm value by entrenching underperforming managers and thereby increasing managerial agency costs. Our findings...

This book comprises 19 papers published in the Special Issue entitled "Corporate Finance", focused on capital structure (Kedzior et al., 2020; Ntoung et al., 2020; Vintilă etal., 2019), dividend policy (Dragotă and Delcea, 2019; Pinto and Rastogi, 2019) and open-market share repurchase announcements (Ding...