Because the personal tax treatments of interest and dividend income likely affect the relative cost of debt and equity financing, a sharp change in tax treatment could affect firms' optimal leverage. This paper examines the effect of the 2003 equity income tax cut on firms' debt usage. Because...

This paper tests how collateral value affects a firm's choice between bank debt and public debt by considering the exogenous variation in the market value of a firm's real estate assets caused by fluctuations in local real estate prices. Using local land supply elasticities as an instrument for...

Because the personal tax treatments of interest and dividend income likely affect the relative cost of debt and equity financing, a sharp change in tax treatment could affect firms' optimal leverage. This paper examines the effect of the 2003 equity income tax cut on firms' debt usage. Because...

Using novel data on detailed country-level sales exposures of U.S. multinational companies (MNCs) and unique identification strategies, we show that international cash flow diversification enhances firm debt capacity, but the magnitude of this effect varies with the innate country institutional...

The past two decades have witnessed a sharp surge in corporate equity payout. The annual net equity payout of non-financial public companies in the U.S. averaged $525 billion (in 2010 dollars) per year from 2004 to 2019, compared to only $141 billion during the prior 17-year period. Using...

This paper provides causal evidence that a firm's operating cost structure is an important determinant of its leverage. We design a quasi-natural experiment exploiting the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 404 to provide us with exogenous variation in the proportion of a company's...