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...

The empirical implications of the trade-off theory, the market timing theory, and Welch's (2003) theory of capital structure are examined using aggregate US data for 1952 to 2000. There is a long-run leverage ratio to which the system reverts. Deviations from that ratio help to predict debt...

It takes time to process purchases and as a result a queue of customers may form. The pricing and service rate decisions of a monopolist who must take this into account are characterized. We find that an increase in the average number of customers arriving in the market either has no effect on...

This paper is a study of the financing actions by firms to adjust leverage: debt reductions, stock sales, debt issues, and stock purchases. Each type of action is positively autocorrelated. The standard empirical models of corporate leverage produce leverage targets that do not correctly predict...

Do bond issuers successfully time the market? To answer this question, we compare market conditions on an issue day with conditions on days in a window around the issue day. We find that compared with windows of 21 days around issue days, bond issuers time the risk-free rate better than pure...