We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model provides a “lookalike” Modigliani-Miller equation that predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is...

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...

We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a dynamic trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is above or below its target leverage. We provide...

This study analyzes how prevailing institutional arrangements i.e., property rights, contracting rights, political institutions, and corporate governance practices affect privatized firms' performance, capital markets development, and economic growth. Most of the studies surveyed show that...

We provide causal empirical evidence that, even among publicly traded firms that seemingly suffer less severe information asymmetries, some firms experience hold-up problems in debt financing. Based on the prediction in Rajan (1992), we examine how changes in the ratio of short-term bank loans...

In this paper, we examine the relation between innovation and a firm's financial dependence using a sample of privately-held and publicly-traded U.S. firms. We find that public firms in external finance dependent industries spend more on R&D and generate a better patent portfolio than their...