Using the staggered introduction of fast-track debt recovery courts in India, we estimate the causal effect of a reduction in debt contract enforcement costs on financing and asset maturity. A reduction in enforcement costs is associated with an increase in long-term debt and a decrease in...

We revisit the well-established puzzle that leverage is negatively correlated with measures of profitability. In contrast, we find that at times when firms are at or close to their optimal level of leverage, the cross-sectional correlation between profitability and leverage is positive. At other...

Motivated by the rising importance of international sourcing by U.S. firms in recent decades, we study the influence of international sourcing on capital structure. We find that international sourcing has a significant negative influence on financial leverage. The negative influence is stronger...

Debt may help to manage type II corporate agency conflicts because it is easier for controlling shareholders to modify the leverage ratio than to modify their share of capital. A sample of 112 firms listed on the French stock market over the period 1998-2009 is empirically tested. It supports an...

Ignoring the cost of debt in firms' financing decisions leads to an overstatement of the effect of taxes. Separately identifying the impact of the cost of debt, I find the effect of taxes on firms' overall debt usage to be insignificant. Rather than influencing the total debt in firms' capital...

A large body of the corporate finance literature is devoted to capital structure. This literature examines whether firms have a target capital structure, and whether they actively rebalance their capital structure towards a target. Conversion of a convertible bond causes a drop in leverage,...

We document that firms decrease their leverage when they convert growth options into tangible assets. We argue that the act of growth option exercise decreases information asymmetry about the firm, which in turn reduces the relative cost of issuing information-sensitive securities such as...

This paper examines international differences in banks' capital structure adjustments across a large panel of 94 countries over the period 1993 to 2007. A bank's ability to adjust its capital ratio is influenced by corporate governance, public policy, market structure, and bank regulatory...

We introduce the concept of the post-merger integration duration (PMID) which is the time delay that it takes a merged entity to fully capture synergistic gains. Using a dynamic model, we examine the effects of this duration on acquiring firms' financing behavior around mergers. When facing a...

We develop a theory of optimal bank leverage in which the benefit of debt in inducing loan monitoring is balanced against the benefit of equity in attenuating risk-shifting. However, faced with socially-costly correlated bank failures, regulators bail out creditors. Anticipation of this...