Lending relationships matter for firm financing. In a model of debt dynamics, we study how lending relationships are formed and how they impact leverage and debt maturity choices. In the model, lending relationships evolve through repeated interactions between firms and debt investors. Stronger...

Private debt contracts tend to have covenants that restrict future investment, restrict capital structure decisions, or impose thresholds for cash flows or other performance measures. While previous studies have demonstrated a relationship between firm characteristics and the overall strictness...

I build a dynamic capital structure model that demonstrates how business-cycle variations in expected growth rates, economic uncertainty, and risk premia influence firms' financing and default policies. Countercyclical fluctuations in risk prices, default probabilities, and default losses arise...

This paper presents evidence that firms choose conservative financial policies partly to mitigate workers' exposure to unemployment risk. We exploit changes in state unemployment insurance laws as a source of variation in the costs borne by workers during layoff spells. We find that higher...

The business cycle dynamics of firms' investment and debt maturity vary across the firm size and age distribution: Young and small firms have strongly pro-cyclical debt maturity and investment, old and large firms a-cyclical debt maturity and weakly pro-cyclical investment. This paper explores...

Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings should be 'safer' and have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary motive for saving cash, which in our model causes...

We test one of the main predictions of the financial flexibility paradigm, that expectations about future firm-specific investment shocks affect the firm's leverage. We extract the expectations of small and large future shocks from the market prices of equity options. We find that leverage...

This paper addresses the following unresolved questions: Why do some firms issue equity instead of debt? Why did most firms retain their cash holdings instead of distributing them as dividends in recent times? How do firms change their financing policies during a period of severe financial...

This paper addresses the following unresolved questions: Why do some firms issue equity instead of debt? Why did most firms retain their cash holdings instead of distributing them as dividends in recent times? How do firms change their financing policies during a period of severe financial...