We document the effect on leverage of a company's working-capital. Working-capital significantly affects a firm's credit ratings and security issuances, as well as influencing its leverage. Payables crowd out debt. Higher receivables and inventories are associated with higher leverage,...

Managers tend to issue equity when a firm is overvalued. Short selling is generally frequent among overvalued firms. By conditioning short selling on firm overvaluation, we show that short selling reduces managerial equity market timing and increases leverage. This moderating impact of short...

This study examines corporate leverage during systemic banking crises in an international setting including 85 countries from 1987 to 2017. Using the historically determined component of institutions and exogenous variations in institution building, the analyses show that leverage cyclicality...

U.S. banks hold significantly more equity capital than required by their regulators. We test competing hypotheses regarding the reasons for this ldquo;excessrdquo; capital, using an innovative partial adjustment approach that allows estimated BHC-specific capital targets and adjustment speeds to...

Yes, they can! Machine learning models that exploit big data identify leverage determinants and predict leverage better than classical methods. By allowing for nonlinearities and complex interactions, machine learning boosts the out-of-sample R-squared from 36% to 56% over linear methods such as...

Despite ample research demonstrating many consequences of bank geographic deregulation, the bank capital determinants literature has not directly tested the effects of this deregulation. This paper fills this important research gap. We find strong evidence that geographic deregulation...

Many authors relate a firm's performance to legal and political features and the regulatory environment in which it operates. This article compares firms' capital structure adjustments across countries and investigates whether institutional differences help explain the variance in estimated...

Bond credit spreads reflect the issuer's expected default probability. In an efficient market, spreads will reflect both the issuer's current risk and investors' expectations about how that risk might change in the future. Collin-Dufresne and Goldstein (2001) show analytically that a firm's...

Prior studies show uncertain associations between board independence and firm performance. We propose a novel measure of board independence and argue that influential CEO-directors (ICDs), those with higher compensation than the appointing firm's CEO, are more independent of appointing firm's...