In this paper we provide new evidence that corporate financing decisions are associated with managerial incentives to report high equity earnings. Managers rely most heavily on debt to finance their asset growth when their future earnings prospects are poor, when they are under pressure due to...

We offer evidence of a new stylized feature of corporate financing decisions: the tendency of managers to rely more on debt financing when earnings prospects are poor. We term this 'leaning against the wind' and consider three possible explanations: market timing, precautionary financing, and...

We use a model of stock price behavior in which the expected rate of return on stocks follows an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process to show that levels of return predictability that cause large variation in valuation ratios and offer significant benefits to dynamic portfolio strategies are hard to...

In this paper we analyze the source and magnitude of marketing gains from selling structured debt securities at yields that reflect only their credit ratings, or specifically at yields on equivalently rated corporate bonds. We distinguish between credit ratings that are based on probabilities of...