This paper explores how the structure of EU non-financial corporation's in terms of size and activity specialisation can influence their financing mix and, particularly, the use of capital markets as a source of funding.Significant differences in the structure and size of firms are observed...

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...

Firms have the incentive to enhance debt financing with higher corporate tax rates due to the increased value of interest deductions from the tax base. However, external debt is relatively costly for corporations with a high firm-specific risk. Moreover, for multinationals, the shifting of...

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...

Firms reduce investment to avoid costly violations of financial covenants, most of which are based on earnings. Empirically, I show that a 25% drop in earnings implies a 15% decrease in investment for the median listed US firm due to the reduced distance to the covenant threshold. To quantify...

We investigate the repercussions of credit market mistakes for a firm's borrowing and investment decisions. When credit ratings are relatively optimistic, we find evidence that firms take advantage of inaccuracies by issuing more debt, increasing leverage, rolling over more debt and lengthening...

We introduce a model in which risk-free interest rate, firm risk, bankruptcy costs, issuance costs, tax benefits on debt, and earnings ratio, determine the optimal choice of leverage and maturity. The model assumes that debt pays a regular flow of interests, allows the firm to rebalance its...

We study the role of peer effects in capital structure decisions by exploiting the heterogeneous and intransitive nature of product market networks combined with spatial econometric techniques that account for these features. In contrast to prior work, this approach allows us to provide...

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...

Understanding the dynamics of the leverage ratio is at the heart of the empirical research about firms' capital structure, as they can be very different under alternative theoretical models. The pillars of almost all empirical applications are the maintained assumptions of poolability and...