Using a comprehensive sample of securities litigation, we examine the effect of financial fraud on the subsequent use of external financing. We find that firms with a recent history of securities litigation, particularly more severe litigation, are less likely to seek external debt and equity...

Default probability plays a central role in the static trade-off theory of capital structure. We directly test this theory by regressing the probability of default on proxies for costs and benefits of debt. Contrary to predictions of the theory, firms with higher bankruptcy costs, i.e., smaller...

Recent research has focused on the estimates of the speed of adjustment to target leverage as the indicators of the importance of dynamic trade-off behavior. We show that the observed corporate financing behavior and the resulting dynamics of corporate debt ratios are such that the speed of...

The paper examines whether security issues and repurchases adjust the capital structure toward the target. The time-series patterns of debt ratios imply that only debt reductions are initiated to offset the accumulated deviation from target leverage. The importance of target leverage in earlier...