I study the business cycle dynamics of the maturity structure of the debt of U.S. non-financial firms. I document three facts: First, the aggregate share of long-term debt in total debt is pro-cyclical. Second, the long-term debt share of small firms has a higher standard deviation and...

We add discrete jumps in the time-to-maturity of a firm's debt to the model of Engle and Siriwardane (2015), such that changes in equity volatility can be explained by the volatility of the firm's assets, its market leverage and investors' perception of the time-to-maturity of the firm's debt....