The inverse relation between leverage and profitability is widely regarded as a serious defect of the tradeoff theory. We show that the defect is not with the theory but with the use of a leverage ratio in which profitability affects both the numerator and the denominator. Profitability directly...

This paper provides a survey of the trade-off theory of corporate capital structure. First we provide an analysis of an equilibrium version of the theory. The firm raises debt from an investor. Debt provides interest tax shields but raises the probability of costly bankruptcy. The model provides...

The pecking order theory of corporate capital structure states that firms finance deficits with internal resources when possible. If internal funds are inadequate, firms obtain external debt. External equity is the last resort. Some financing patterns in the data are consistent with pecking...

This paper studies the effect of top managers on corporate financing decisions. Differences among CEOs account for a great deal of the variation in leverage among firms. This effect can account for the firm fixed effects on capital structure stressed by Lemmon et al (2006). After a CEO is forced...

Taxes, bankruptcy costs, transactions costs, adverse selection, and agency conflicts have all been advocated as major explanations for the corporate use of debt financing. These ideas have often been synthesized into the trade-off theory and the pecking order theory of leverage. These theories...

This paper examines the relative importance of many factors in the leverage decisions of publicly traded American firms from 1950 to 2003. The most reliable factors are median industry leverage (+ effect on leverage), market-to-book ratio (-), tangibility (+), profits (-), log of assets (+), and...

It is widely believed that once news is made public the information is fully reflected in prices within at most a day or two (the efficient market hypothesis). We test this idea using the set of 245,429 Wall Street Journal corporate news stories from 1973 to 2001. Using computational linguistics...

We show how trade credit use depends on the value of collateral in a repossession, as well as the extent to which firms face adverse selection problems when dealing with an outside investor. If a buyer defaults, then the seller is in a better position than is the investor to reclaim value from...