This paper examines the effect of earnings management on financial leverage and how this relation is influenced by institutional environments by employing a large panel of 25,798 firms across 37 countries spanning the years 1989 to 2009. We find that firms with high earnings management...

Surprisingly little is known about the business cycle dynamics of leverage. The existing evidence documents that target leverage evolves pro-cyclically either for all firms or financially constrained ones. In contrast, we show that, on average, target leverage ratios evolve counter-cyclically...

We find that bond issues increased substantially since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis in calendar week 12 (March 16-20) for bonds rated A or higher, but surprisingly also for bonds rated BBB or lower. In contrast to existing evidence on bond maturities in economic downturns, we document that...

This paper examines how CEO overconfidence affects firms' choice of debt issuance among private debt (i.e., bank loan and non-bank loan) and public bond. Using a sample of U.S. rated public firms, we find that firms with overconfident CEOs tend to issue more private debt and issue private debt...

Using a comprehensive international sample of 18,932 firms across 40 countries, we find that cross-country variations in ownership concentration are attributable to differences in firm sizes. Ownership concentration in large firms differs strikingly between countries. For example, large U.S....

We study a continuous-time dynamic capital structure model in which a firm can continuously adjust its capital structure. Unlike previous models, we assume heterogeneous equity and debt holders and segmented equity and debt markets. We show that the expected future equity and debt market...

This paper provides empirical evidence showing that dual-class firms use dividend payments to mitigate agency problems while using repurchases of superior shares to maintain the private benefits of control. With a sample of dual-class firms from 1994 to 2015 that have both their superior voting...

We document that good ES-performance is rewarded in primary bond markets by lower credit spreads. This effect is strongest for low-rated bonds and for firms in manufacturing, agriculture, mining and construction. However, not all ES-dimensions are equally important. The above results are driven...

Private benefits of control distort the risk choices of owner-managers. In particular, when riskier projects entail a larger increase in cash flow than in private benefits (if successful), (more) equity financing renders the owner-manager (more) conservative, which lowers both expected payoff...