Why don't non-financial companies in Europe issue more equity? Using experimental data on firms from Europe, this paper analyses how firms trade-off between debt and external equity financing. It finds that firms are willing to pay a substantial premium on debt when presented with an equity...

This paper investigates the impact of a 2018 intervention by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) limiting the amount of leverage that investors can take on their trading activities. While it successfully reduced the leverage-usage, investors shifted their trading activities to...

The purpose of this paper is to explain the interaction mechanism between the capital structure of a modern company, the implying agency cost that is raised when the company is expanding and the corporate governance system that should be implemented in order to achieve a smoothness of the...

In this paper, we examine the impact of credit rating changes on the financing decisions of overconfident CFOs. We find that CFO overconfidence significantly increases the sensitivity of net debt issuances to the rating changes, particularly when firms have no access to low-risk debt....

We address our research to the problem of managerial overconfidence and financing behavior. The aim of the paper is, hence, to ascertain the pattern of financing decisions of overconfident managers and identify the relevant capital structure theory (trade-off or pecking order theory) that can be...

We explore the role of national culture of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in firms' financing decision, enacted via the tripartite interaction between values, attitudes and behavior. Values are the cultural core that determines attitudes, ultimately steering the behavior of CEOs. Our research...

We examine CEO partisanship and the speed of adjustment to target leverage ratios. Republicans, who prior literature views as risk-averse, are expected to move more aggressively to their targets when over-levered and more slowly when under-levered. However, Republicans’ dislike of taxes...

We examine whether criminal records of CEOs and rank-and-file employees are associated with firms’ likelihood of bankruptcy and whether lenders adjust their required cost of debt accordingly. We use a nationwide sample of private firms and criminal registers covering all firm employees. We...

This paper examines how external governance pressure from the media affects capital structure. Using a comprehensive set of corporate news, we find a negative relation between media coverage and financial leverage. An instrumental variable approach suggests that the effect is causal....

This paper examines how CEO overconfidence affects firms' choice of debt issuance among private debt (i.e., bank loan and non-bank loan) and public bond. Using a sample of U.S. rated public firms, we find that firms with overconfident CEOs tend to issue more private debt and issue private debt...