This paper provides causal evidence that a firm's operating cost structure is an important determinant of its leverage. We design a quasi-natural experiment exploiting the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 404 to provide us with exogenous variation in the proportion of a company's...

While recent literature has documented that U.S. family firms differ markedly from their non-family counterparts, there is a paucity of evidence on how these firms differ in terms of their cost of capital or financial structure. In this paper, we show that family and non-family firms differ in...

While previous literature documents weak effects of unionization on payout policy on average, we find that this average relationship hides significant heterogeneous effects of unionization on payouts across firms that depend on firm profitability. The effect of unionization on payouts is...

Using staggered corporate income tax changes across U.S. states, we show that taxes have a first-order effect on capital structure. Firms increase leverage by around 40 basis points for every percentage-point tax increase. Consistent with dynamic tradeoff theory, the effect is asymmetric:...

Morellec, Nikolov, and Schürhoff (2012) predict that a self-interested manager prefers a leverage level that is lower than the shareholders' desired level, and effective corporate governance encourages timely capital structure rebalancing. In a U.S. sample during 1996-2008, we confirm that both...

This paper investigates the impact of inter-firm relationships on a firm's incentive to adjust its capital structure. We predict that firms with tight business relationships with other firms have less incentive to adjust their capital structure because their information will be propagated...

Using staggered corporate income tax changes across U.S. states, we show that taxes have a first-order effect on capital structure. Firms increase leverage by around 40 basis points for every percentage-point tax increase. Consistent with dynamic tradeoff theory, the effect is asymmetric:...

This study has aim to examine the validity of Market Timing Theory (MTT) from Baker and Wurgler (2002) in the Indonesian context. The essence of MTT is when the market price overvalued, the firms will take debt financing and otherwise for undervalued condition. MTT is actually the development of...

In this paper we examine the effect of excess control rights on the leverage decisions of Chinese non-SOEs before and after the reforms of non-tradable shares. We identify that both inter-corporate loans and related party transactions are channels through which controlling shareholders...

We model theoretically the optimal capital structure of entrepreneurial firm relying on an endogenous estimation of the return requested by entrepreneurs that compensates for the risk they incur in case of bankruptcy. We estimate the probability according to the Bayesian approach. We also...