We survey 500 business firms about the initial capital and its adequacy for business startup, how much the banking system meets the needs of business firms for loans, need for new sources of financing, if businesses possess sufficient information regarding the capital market, whether the lack of...

In this paper we treat economic and legal advantages to firms in business financing through the issuance of bonds. Besides theoretical analysis paper includes the empirical analysis, a survey conducted in 50 businesses, including individual businesses and corporations, about the types of...

Theory suggests that debt financing, relative to equity financing, makes managers reluctant to part with assets. Our evidence supports this theoretical prediction, revealing that the reluctance to part with a debt financed asset causes two decision errors—(1) participants forego investments...

We empirically examine theories of secured debt. Credit risk and asset volatility increase with secured debt issuance, and the strength of this association is unrelated to contemporaneous investment. Hand-collected data reveals most secured debt is secured on all assets of the firm and rarely...

We develop a dynamic agency model of a public corporation. Managers underinvest because of risk aversion. They smooth rents and payout. They do not exploit interest tax shields fully. The interactions of investment, debt and payout decisions can change drastically depending on managers'...

We use a dynamic model of the firm to ascertain both the value and the determinants of the debt tax shields. For a representative U.S. firm, we find that the value of the interest tax shields represents less than 5% of firm value, and it varies considerably across U.S. industries. Our results...

This paper investigates the link between corporate debt and investment for a group of five peripheral euro area countries. Using firm-level data from 2005-2014, we postulate a non-linear corporate leverage-investment relationship and derive thresholds beyond which leverage has a negative and...

The tax shield as present value of debt-related tax savings plays an important role in firm valuation. Driving the risk of future debt levels, the firm's strategy to adjust the absolute debt level to future changes of the firm value, labeled as (re-) financing policy, affects the value of tax...

One of the most important discussions in economic research is about how to provide the right incentives to individuals. Usually when a regulator defines a rule, it has to deal with some tradeoff. This paper proposes to study a specific trade-off that emerges with the possibility of reversal of...

Evidence shows that firms market time their debt maturity. Specifically, maturity is found to be inversely proportional to the term spread (the difference between long and short-term Treasury yield). That is, firms issue short-term debt when the term spread is large and they increase maturity as...