We propose a simple idea that corporate debt maturity should serve as a good indicator of future firm performance volatility. We show in a simple two-period model that the riskiness of corporate investment is a decreasing function of corporate debt maturity. If “observable” corporate debt...

We examine the effect of the bond capital supply uncertainty of institutional investors (e.g., mutual bond funds and insurance companies) on the leverage of the firm using a novel data set. Our main finding is that the supply uncertainty of the firm's bond investor base — measured as (i) the...

We develop a dynamic investment options framework with optimal capital structure and analyze the effect of debt maturity. We find that in the absence of financing constraints short-term debt maximizes firm value. In contrast with most literature results, in the absence of constraints, higher...

This study examines the whether or not family firms are financially healthier than non-family in terms of capital structure and leverage. It therefore takes into consideration the existence of any significant differences between the leverage and risk choices of family and non-family firms. Using...

This work analyses the main trends in bond financing by Italian non-financial firms and its role in relation to bank credit across different economic phases. The first part of the analysis refers to the 2008-2019 period, characterized by both crisis and recovery episodes, while the second part...

Asymmetric volatility in equity markets has been widely documented in finance, where two competing explanations, as considered in Bekaert and Wu (2000), are the financial leverage and the volatility feedback hypothesis. We explicitly test for the role of both hypotheses in explaining extreme...

The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the role of firm- industry-, institutional-, and macroeconomic-factors on a firm's capital structure decision in the context of nine African countries. To this end, we consider a sample of 986 non-financial firms over a period of 10 years...

The economic losses inflicted by the pandemic shock caused severe capital shortfalls for many corporates, which led to public measures being adopted to support firms’ recapitalization and the rebalancing of their financial structure. However, evidence about the dynamics and features of these...

We test one of the main predictions of the financial flexibility paradigm that expectations about future firm-specific shocks affect the firm's leverage. We extract the expectations of small and large future shocks from the market prices of equity options. We find that expectations for future...

In March 2008, Malaysia’s political landscape was shaken by election results showing that the Barisan Nasional had won less than two thirds of the parliamentary seats and lost five states to the opposition. A two-thirds supermajority had been seen as a sacred threshold for the coalition to...