We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model provides a “lookalike” Modigliani-Miller equation that predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is...

We develop a dynamic investment options framework with optimal capital structure and analyze the effect of debt maturity. We find that in the absence of financing constraints short-term debt maximizes firm value. In contrast with most literature results, in the absence of constraints, higher...