We study incremental capital structure decisions of Dutch companies. From 1977 to 1996 these companies have made 110 issues of public and private seasoned equity and 137 public issues of straight debt. Managers of Dutch companies are entrenched. For this reason a discrepancy exists between...

This paper examines the relation between cash flow, corporate governance and fixed-investment spending. In perfect capital markets we expect no systematic relationship. However, Myers and Majluf's (1984) asymmetric information hypothesis and Jensen's (1986) managerial discretion hypothesis...

In this paper we empirically investigate the determinants of leverage and specific agency problems and we examine the relations between leverage and these agency problems. We use structural-equations modeling with latent variables and questionnaire data. The questions concern the characteristics...

This paper investigates the determinants of Dutch firms' dividend policies in the 20th century. We identify three distinct episodes and document shifts in dividend policies in the 1930s and 1980s, because firm managers cater to the changing preferences of shareholders. The first episode, prior...

The Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) journal classification list uses a methodology where a committee of experts puts a specific percentage of journals in each discipline in a certain category (A*, A, B, or C). We study whether this approach creates unequal opportunities in favor of some...

Over recent years, a substantial fraction of U.S. convertible bond issues have been combined with a stock repurchase. This paper explores the motivations for these combined transactions. We argue that convertible debt issuers buy back their stock in order to facilitate short selling by...

We analyze the importance of firm-specific and country-specific factors in the leverage choice of firms from 42 countries around the world. Our analysis yields two new results. First, we find that firm-specific determinants of leverage differ across countries, while prior studies implicitly...

This paper examines the interaction between a firm's capital structure and its market share. Theory predicts that this relation depends on the type of strategic competition (i.e., Cournot or Bertrand). We distinguish between Cournot and Bertrand industries in a sample of U.S. manufacturing firms...

We investigate how competitive behavior affects the capital structure of a firm. Theory predicts that the impact of different types of output market uncertainty (in particular, unanticipated shocks in demand and costs) on a firm's leverage depends on the type of competition in an industry. We...

This paper finds that frequent bond issuers get significantly better pricing than infrequent issuers, with yield spread discounts of up to 117 basispoints. We document firms' bond issue frequencies for windows from one week to six years before the current issue and relate them to yield spreads....