On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

Prior research shows that technology spillovers across firms increase innovation, productivity, and value. We study how firms finance their own growth stimulated by technology spillovers from their technological peer firms. We find that greater technology spillovers lead to higher leverage. This...

Standard factor pricing models do not capture well the common time-series or cross-sectional variation in average returns of financial stocks. We propose a five-factor asset pricing model that complements the standard Fama and French (1993) three-factor model with a financial sector ROE factor...

Using a dataset of both public and private firm connections, I find a 1.5-percentage-point increase in long-term book leverage of a firm leads to a 10-percentage-point increase in the probability it adds an additional supplier. At the same time, I do not find significant increases in sales or...

I examine the role of sell-side debt analyst reports in the corporate bond market for financially distressed firms. Debt analysts are not subject to the same conflict-of-interest regulations as equity analysts, and for this reason it is an open question whether the primary function of debt...

We investigate equilibrium debt dynamics for a firm that cannot commit to a future debt policy and is subject to a fixed restructuring cost. We formally characterize equilibria when the firm is not required to repurchase outstanding debt prior to issuing additional debt. For realistic values of...

We propose a tractable model of a firm's dynamic debt and equity issuance policies in the presence of asymmetric information. Because "investment-grade" firms can access debt markets, managers who observe a bad private signal can both conceal this information and shield shareholders from...

This paper develops a structural equilibrium model with intertemporal macroeconomic risk, incorporating the fact that firms are heterogeneous in their asset composition. Compared with firms that are mainly composed of invested assets, firms with growth options have higher costs of debt because...

We present the puzzling evidence that, from 1962 to 2009, an average 10.2% of large public nonfinancial US firms have zero debt and almost 22% have less than 5% book leverage ratio. Zero-leverage behavior is a persistent phenomenon. Dividend-paying zero-leverage firms pay substantially higher...