There has been an active debate whether global warming will result in a net gain or net loss for United States agriculture. With mounting evidence that climate is warming, we show that such warming will have substantial impacts on agricultural yields by the end of the century: yields of three...

Unregulated U.S. corporations dramatically increased their debt usage over the past century. Aggregate leverage - low and stable before 1945 - more than tripled between 1945 and 1970 from 11% to 35%, eventually reaching 47% by the early 1990s. The median firm in 1946 had no debt, but by 1970 had...

We review recent evidence and future directions for empirical research on financial contracting in the context of corporate finance. Specifically, we survey evidence pertaining to incentive conflicts, control rights, collateral, renegotiation, and interactions between financial contracts and...

Using a large sample of private credit agreements between US publicly traded firms and financial institutions, we show that over 90% of long-term debt contracts are renegotiated prior to their stated maturity. Renegotiations result in large changes to the amount, maturity, and pricing of the...

We examine how shocks to the supply of credit impact corporate financing and investment using the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert, Inc., the passage of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act, and regulatory changes in the insurance industry as an exogenous...

We compare the dividend policies of publicly- and privately-held firms in order to help identify the forces shaping corporate dividends, and shed light on the behavior of privately-held companies. We show that private firms smooth dividends significantly less than their public counterparts,...

We provide evidence on the covenant structure of corporate loan agreements. Building on the work of Jensen and Meckling (1976), Myers (1977) and Smith and Warner (1979), we summarize and test the implications for what we refer to as the Agency Theory of Covenants (ATC), using a large sample of...

We empirically examine whether firms engage in dynamic rebalancing of their capital structures, while allowing for costly adjustment. We begin by showing that the presence of adjustment costs has significant implications for the dynamic behavior of corporate financial policy and the...

We provide evidence on the covenant structure of corporate loan agreements. Building on the work of Jensen and Meckling (1976), Myers (1977) and Smith and Warner (1979), we summarize and test the implications for what we refer to as the Agency Theory of Covenants (ATC), using a large sample of...