We explore the effect of financial development on corporate capital structure and the tightness of financial constraints that firms face. We employ an econometric technique that allows us to explicitly test for convergence in capital structure. This technique increases the power of our statistical tests. In doing so, we identify a group of convergent firms. The driving force of convergence is financial development, which positively affects the firms' leverage ratio. We also identify a group of firms, whose leverage is not affected by financial development, because they are financially constrained.

We consistently show that in large equity markets, the dividend–price ratio is significantly related to the growth of future dividends. To uncover this relation, we use monthly dividends and a mixed data sampling technique, which allows us to address within-year seasonality. Our approach avoids the use of overlapping observations and at the same time reduces the impact of price volatility on the dividend–price ratio. An empirical analysis using market-level data from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan strongly supports the dividend growth predictability hypothesis, suggesting that time aggregation of dividends eliminates significant information.