This research investigates the relationship between corporate block ownership and firm financial leverage. Corporate blockholders, which are nonfinancial firms who hold more than five percent equity in a target industrial firm, can affect the target firm's policies through their business...

Using a dataset of both public and private firm connections, I find a 1.5-percentage-point increase in long-term book leverage of a firm leads to a 10-percentage-point increase in the probability it adds an additional supplier. At the same time, I do not find significant increases in sales or...

Priority spreading refers to the practice of firms increasing their reliance on secured and subordinated debt and reducing their reliance on senior debt as their credit quality deteriorates. We argue that priority spreading occurs, in part, because security provides creditors with greater...

We investigate the effect of board connections on the debt structure of private firms. Using a comprehensive panel data set from Italy, our empirical evidence indicates that independent directors who sit on multiple boards facilitate firms' access to external debt, mostly in the form of trade...

We augment the LLSV creditor rights index with a new “restructuring index” that measures the incentives provided to creditors to grant concessions outside formal bankruptcy. We study the joint impact of the two indexes on a firm's leverage policy. We show that the two indexes have at most a...

We explore the role of national culture of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in firms' financing decision, enacted via the tripartite interaction between values, attitudes and behavior. Values are the cultural core that determines attitudes, ultimately steering the behavior of CEOs. Our research...

Amid record levels of corporate cash and debt, this study finds that firms acquire cash, then subsequently increase debt instead of reducing debt after the Homeland Investment Act of 2003. Two possible motives for this change are 1) increasing tax benefits of debt and 2) the role of cash as debt...

Objective - Empirical finance literature has added a new twist to the debt conservatism puzzle within the broader capital structure puzzle, namely the phenomenon of zero leverage. Motivated by Strebulaev and Yang (2013), this study investigates the attributes of zero leverage firms in Nigeria in...

The goal of this article is to analyze the impact of equity tax shields, that were allowed in Austria from 2000 to 2004, on the capital structure of Austrian firms, both at book values and at market values. We see that the choice of the leverage ratio determines whether or not one can find an...