Much attention has been paid to the large decreases in value of non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) during the financial crisis. Many observers have argued that the fall in prices was partly driven by decreased liquidity and fire sales. We investigate whether capital...

Corporate leverage responds differently to employees' rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees' rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series,...

Using a novel dataset of accounting and market information that spans most publicly traded nonfinancial firms over the last century, we show that U.S. federal government debt issuance significantly affects corporate financial policies and balance sheets through its impact on investors' portfolio...

This research study examines the mediating role of cash holdings between the economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and corporate leverage relationship. Using stepwise regression analysis and annual firm-level data of 2,534 U.S. firms listed at NYSE over 1995-2018, we provide novel evidence that cash...

This paper studies the relationship between investment volatility, capital structure, and cash levels. Our evidence suggests: i) firms with relatively high realizations of future investment volatility hold relatively low levels of debt and high levels of cash, ii) firms fund large investment by...

We study the financial determinants of cash holdings and discuss the importance of firm size in the post-crisis period. We employ panel data regression analysis on a sample of 6629 non-financial and non-utility listed companies in the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2018. We focus on the comparative...

We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life cycles and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms’ balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business...

In this paper, we ask how firms’ optimal debt structure responds to a change in the bankruptcy regime. While existing work shows that this relationship is dependent on the ex-ante liquidation value of a firm, we demonstrate that the ownership of lenders they are connected to also matters. We...

In this paper, we revisit a frequently employed simplification within the WACC approach that company cost of capital kV is supposed to be invariant to the debt ratio and therefore equal to the unlevered cost kU . Even though we know from Miles and Ezzell (1980) that kV formally differs from kU ,...

We estimate the costs of financial distress prior to default (pre-default costs) separately from the loss incurred at default (the loss given default) using a dynamic trade-off model of capital structure. We document that pre-default costs are on average equal to 6.5% of firm value per year. We...