I develop a dynamic capital structure model in which shareholders determine a firm's leverage ratio, debt maturity, and default strategy. In my model, the firm's debt matures all at once. Therefore, after repaying the principal shareholders own all the firm's cash flows and can pick a new...

Deleveraging, whether via reductions in debt or increases in assets, is costly due to value transfers from shareholders to creditors. It is especially costly in the presence of long-term debt and when the need to deleverage is high. This paper, first, provides empirical evidence consistent with...

This paper extends our knowledge of corporate debt maturity structure by examining whether and to what extent overconfident CEOs affect maturity decisions. Consistent with a demand side story, we find that firms with overconfident CEOs tend to adopt a shorter debt maturity structure by using a...

We propose a simple idea that corporate debt maturity should serve as a good indicator of future firm performance volatility. We show in a simple two-period model that the riskiness of corporate investment is a decreasing function of corporate debt maturity. If “observable” corporate debt...