The paper investigates the impact on credit risk of capital structure choices driven by firm's investments and financing decisions. We propose a realistic dynamic structural model featuring endogenous investment, capital structure and default. We calibrate the model on accounting and market...

Credit constrained firms prefer types of capital that generate significant pledgeable output and are liquid, since they loosen current and future credit constraints. Because pledgeability and liquidity are low for long-term firm-specific capital, a negative temporary aggregate productivity shock...

We develop a dynamic model of investment, capital structure, leasing, and risk management based on firms' need to collateralize promises to pay with tangible assets. Both financing and risk management involve promises to pay subject to collateral constraints. Leasing is strongly collateralized...

This paper shows that non-convex costs of financial adjustment are quantitatively relevant for explaining firm dynamics. First, empirically, financial activity is lumpy, more than investment activity. Second, non-convex costs are necessary, in the context of a dynamic investment and financing...

Why and how do corporations accumulate liquid assets? We show theoretically that intertemporal trade-offs between interest income taxation and the cost of external finance determine optimal savings. We find the striking result that, controlling for Tobin's q, saving and cash flow are negatively...

Building on recent developments in behavioral asset pricing, we develop a model in which an increase in the dispersion of investor beliefs under short-selling constraints predicts a bubble, or a rise in a stock's price above its fundamental value. Our model predicts that managers respond to...

Firms deliberately but temporarily deviate from permanent leverage targets by issuing transitory debt to fund investment. Leverage targets conservatively embed the option to issue transitory debt, with the evolution of leverage reflecting the sequence of investment outlays. We estimate a dynamic...

This paper examines whether firms react to cash shortfalls by cutting investment. We use a regression discontinuity design in which the discontinuity is the point of violation of underfunding of corporate defined benefit pension plans. We reexamine the puzzling evidence in Rauh (2006) that...

In a frictionless world, investment is perfectly elastic to changes in the discount rate. With financial frictions, investment is less elastic, meaning that a given magnitude of change in investment is associated with a higher magnitude of change in the discount rate. Equivalently, investment is...

This paper studies how investor heterogeneity determines equilibrium debt maturity in a model with default. The traditional representative investor assumption is a special case where a weak form of the Modigliani-Miller theorem holds; allocations with either all long- or all short-term debt are...