We put the recent increase in corporate cash in historic perspective by studying nearly 100 years of average and aggregate cash holdings. Corporate cash more than doubled in the first 25 years of our sample before returning to 1920 levels by 1970. Since then, average and aggregate patterns...

We document the cross-sectional properties of corporate dividend-smoothing policies and relate them to extant theories. We find that younger, smaller firms, firms with low dividend yields and more volatile earnings and returns, and firms with fewer and more disperse analyst forecasts smooth...

This article reviews empirical capital structure research, concentrating on papers published since 2005. We begin by documenting three dimensions of capital structure variation: cross firm, cross industry, and within firm through time. We summarize how well the traditional trade-off and pecking...

Do credit market conditions affect corporate capital structures? In an attempt to answer this question, I study two natural experiments that affect corporate access to bank credit: the 1961 expansion of bank credit due to the emergence of the market for CDs, and the contraction associated with...

This paper explores the relevance of capital market supply frictions for corporate capital structure decisions. To identify this relationship, I study the effect on firms' financial structures of two changes in bank funding constraints: the 1961 emergence of the market for CDs, and the 1966...

We survey the empirical literature on corporate dividend policy, with emphasis on develop- ments over the last two decades. We divide our review into two parts. We first summarize what we “know” about dividend policy – the set of observations about the nature of (and trends in) dividend...