This paper examines the impact of product market competition and corporate governance on the cost of debt financing and the use of bond covenants. We find that more anti-takeover provisions are associated with a lower cost of debt only in competitive industries. Because they are exposed to...

A large body of empirical literature investigates differences in financing structures across firms. Private firms’ financing receives little attention due to the lack of data. Using administrative confidential data on the universe of Canadian corporate firms, we compare financing relationships...

This paper investigates the impact of pyramid ownership structure and multiple controlling shareholders on firm leverage. Pyramids, having at least one controlling shareholder and a subsidiary, rely significantly more on debt financing than non-pyramid firms. Moreover, higher leverage is...

This paper investigates the determinants of corporate risk taking. Shareholders with substantial equity ownership in a single company may advocate conservative investment policies due to greater exposure to firm risk. Using a large cross-country sample, I find a positive relationship between...

In an investigation of banks’ loan pricing policies in the United States over the past two decades, this study finds supporting evidence for the bank risk-taking channel of monetary policy. We show that banks charge lower spreads when they lend to riskier borrowers relative to the spreads they...

Banks reliance on short-term funding has increased over time. While an effective source of financing in good times, the 2007 financial crisis has exposed the vulnerability of banks and ultimately firms to such a liability structure. The authors show that banks that relied most on wholesale...

According to the rent-extraction hypothesis, weak corporate governance allows entrenched CEOs to capture the pay-setting process and benefit from events outside of their control -- get paid for luck. In this paper, I find that the independence requirement imposed on boards of directors by the...

[...]Our analysis of how U.S. financial market structure haschanged over the last decade produces more definitiveconclusions. Using firm-level data from a variety of sources, including data collected by central banks, we document that inaggregate, most U.S. wholesale credit and capital markets...

In basic economic growth models, energy is neglected as a production factor, and output is generated from capital and labor in a single-sector process, with most of growth attributed to an exogenous residual. However, alternative approaches argue for a multi-sector system in which the major...

Neoclassical models disregard the role of energy in production, equating a factor's output elasticity with its cost share, but failing to explain growth without a residual term. In contrast, ecological economics acknowledges energy's importance in production, regardless of its cost share. The...