We find that US public firms spread out their debt more across different sources in recession quarters, making measures of debt concentration move pro-cyclically, on average. There is substantial cross-sectional variation in these dynamics. In particular, firms with already low leverage and high...

Private benefits of control distort the risk choices of owner-managers. In particular, when riskier projects entail a larger increase in cash flow than in private benefits (if successful), (more) equity financing renders the owner-manager (more) conservative, which lowers both expected payoff...