We examine the wealth impact of inside ownership on firms announcing leverage increases by issuing senior securities that retire junior securities. We find the market response to leverage increase announcements is influenced by the percentage of inside ownership. We show that firms with greater...

In this paper, I extend the stock-for-debt research by investigating whether stock value is influenced by how a firm changes its leverage ratio in relationship to its industry leverage ratio norm. I find that announcement-period stock returns for firms moving "away from" industry debt-to-equity...