We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a dynamic trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is above or below its target leverage. We provide...

We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a dynamic trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is above or below its target leverage. We provide...

We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a dynamic trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is above or below its target leverage. We provide...

The existing empirical evidence does not yet provide a clear understanding of how leverage and expected equity returns are related. While some studies show a positive relationship between financial leverage and returns, others conclude that returns are either insensitive or decrease with...

We document that public interventions in the corporate sector during the COVID-19 pandemic help firms access bank loans, cushion liquidity shortfalls, and boost their market valuations. We use firm-level data on COVID-19-related news to trace firms’ liquidity shocks in several European...

We investigate the risk taking incentives of "stressed banks" - the banks that are subject to annual regulatory stress tests in the U.S. since 2011. We document that stress tests effectively encourage prudent investment from stressed banks through regulatory monitoring, but also provide them...