In a dynamic continuous-time model, we examine the impact of a manager-shareholder conflict over the choice of investment risk on firm value and optimal capital structure. The manager's optimal investment risk policy is substantially different from the policy that maximizes equity or total firm...

We propose that stronger creditor rights in bankruptcy reduce corporate risk-taking. Employing country-level data, we find that strong creditor rights are associated with a greater propensity of firms to engage in diversifying mergers, and this propensity changes in response to changes in the...

U.S. venture capital financings of U.S. entrepreneurial firms with up to 213 observations is consistent with the proposition that convertible preferred equity is the optimal form of venture capital finance. This paper introduces new evidence from 208 U.S. venture capital financings of Canadian...

This paper introduces a dataset on forms of finance used in 12,363 Canadian and US venture capital and private equity financings of Canadian entrepreneurial firms from 1991 to 2003. The data comprise different types of venture capital institutions, including corporate, limited partnership,...

This paper analyzes the efficiency and distributional consequences of the largest out- of-court restructuring ever ($20 billion of debt). The restructuring was engineered by a five-bank committee composed of the largest creditors, which took effective control of the company at the onset of...

This article incorporates well-documented managerial traits into a tradeoff model of capital structure to study their impact on corporate financial policy and firm value. Optimistic and/or overconfident managers choose higher debt levels and issue new debt more often, but need not follow a...

Prior research has argued that convertible preferred equity is the optimal form of venture capital finance, based on datasets with up to 213 observations from the U.S., where unique tax biases exist in favour of convertible preferred. This paper introduces a comparable sample of 3083 Canadian...

I examine the effect of investment frictions on leverage dynamics, using a model of the firm whose investments are 1) indivisible and lumpy, and 2) subject to time-to-build, which is a time lag between when investment expenditures are made and when the investment begins to generate cash. The...

We analyze how the availability of internal funds affects a firm's investment in the presence of capital market imperfections. Using a model that endogenizes the cost of external funds and allows for negative levels of internal funds, we show that under otherwise standard assumptions, investment...

Although Arzac and Glosten (2005) affirm that the value of tax shields depends upon the nature of the equity stochastic process, which, in turn depends upon the free cash flow process, I prove that the value of tax shields depends only upon the nature of the stochastic process of the net...