We exploit exogenous variation in turnovers of China's municipal political leaders to study how political incentives affect firms' strategic tax avoidance behavior. We document robust cycles in corporate tax compliance corresponding with the timing of political turnovers. Specifically, we find...

I build a dynamic capital structure model that demonstrates how business-cycle variations in expected growth rates, economic uncertainty, and risk premia influence firms' financing and default policies. Countercyclical fluctuations in risk prices, default probabilities, and default losses arise...

Although the threat of rare economic disasters can have large effect on asset prices, difficulty in inference regarding both their likelihood and severity provides the potential for disagreements among investors. Such disagreements lead investors to insure each other against the types of...

We build a dynamic capital structure model to study the link between firms' systematic risk exposures and their time-varying debt maturity choices, as well as its implications for the term structure of credit spreads. Compared to short-term debt, long-term debt helps reduce rollover risks, but...

I build a dynamic capital structure model that demonstrates how business-cycle variations in expected growth rates, economic uncertainty, and risk premia influence firms' financing and default policies. Countercyclical fluctuations in risk prices, default probabilities, and default losses arise...