Serfling (2016) examines how the increase in firing costs impacts the capital structure decisions of firms and hypothesizes that higher firing costs of labor lead to a decline in a firm’s financial leverage use by directly increasing its distress costs and indirectly lifting its operating...

Morellec, Nikolov, and Schürhoff (2012) predict that a self-interested manager prefers a leverage level that is lower than the shareholders' desired level, and effective corporate governance encourages timely capital structure rebalancing. In a U.S. sample during 1996-2008, we confirm that both...

A debate exists on the issue of whether a governance system is value additive or even necessary for a privately-held firm. One side of the debate suggests that, in absence of agency problems, a private firm does not need a costly governance system. The other side argues that a private firm...

Much debate exists about the effectiveness of Economic Value Added (EVA). We evaluate 11 common concerns about EVA and conclude that the major concerns are that EVA: (1) is distorted by the depreciation method, (2) might require complex adjustments; (3) is a short-term measure; (4) is an absolute...

Employing a sample of voluntary CEO turnovers selected from S&P 500 firms over the period 2004-2012, we investigate the impact of the prior firm's performance on the length of time expired between when a CEO resigns and when he/she is hired for an equivalent job with a similar company. We find...

This study investigates the effects of firm-level political risk on corporate investments and operating efficiencies for industrially diversified and focused firms. Using firm-level political risk data from Hassan et al.(2019), we document that both political risk and diversification lead to...

Existing literature on dual holding exclusively focuses on cases where the holder is primarily a creditor and buys the firm’s stocks to reduce potential wealth transfer. However, wealth transfer is not a concern when the dual holder is a stockholder first and later becomes a bondholder. We...

As a firm deviates from its target leverage, marginal bankruptcy costs change at a faster speed than marginal tax shield. This renders the speed of adjustment (SOA) of capital structure an increasing function of the starting deviation from the target. Adopting a bootstrapping-based estimation,...

This paper analyses to what extent the Spanish provinces have shown a convergence process since 1980 to nowadays. The application of the Phillips-Sul methodology to the HDI recently developped by IVIE lead us to show that we cannot admit the exitence of a unique convergence process between them....

This study reconsiders the common unit root/co-integration approach to test for the Fisher effect for the economies of the G7 countries. We first show that nominal interest and inflation rates are better represented as I(0) variables. Later, we use the Bai–Perron procedure to show the...