As demonstrated by Boyce and Kalotay (1979) and Brick and Ravid (1985), the use of long-term debt may be preferred because of tax-related advantages. Brick and Ravid show that if there exists a tax advantage to debt and nonstochastic interest rates, long-term debt will increase the present value of the tax benefits of debt if the term structure of interest rates, adjusted for risk of default, is increasing. A decreasing term structure, on the other hand, calls for short-term debt. The present paper extends the tax-induced argument of Brick and Ravid to allow for the presence of stochastic interest rates. Once interest rates are uncertain, pricing even under risk neutrality becomes a complex issue. We analyze the debt maturity decision under two competing pricing equations: the return to maturity expectations hypothesis and the local expectations hypothesis. (This terminology is used in Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1981) and Campbell (1986).) Under uncertainty, a debt capacity factor will create an additional incentive to issue long-term debt. Our other results may be interpreted to indicate that if the term premium, the difference between the implied forward interest rate and the future expected spot rate, is positive (sufficiently negative) then long-term (short-term) debt maturity strategy is optimal.

We analyze a model in which firms signal their quality by using financial policies to commit to cash outflows. Two financial policies may be used: dividend and debt-service obligations. We find sufficient conditions for the informational equilibrium to entail concommitant use of both dividends and leverage in the cost-minimizing combination of the commitment signal. In this equilibrium, better firms pay higher dividends and are more highly levered than lower quality firms.

Center for Research in Financial Services for financial support. The standard disclaimer applies. Optimal Financial Contracts for a Start-Up with Unlimited Operating Discretion This paper presents a model in which asymmetric information and extreme uncertainty lead to the exclusive use of equity and riskless debt for small business financing. The paper derives these results without any restrictions on the available contract space, the distribution function governing a project’s payoff, or the risk aversion of most potential entrepreneurs. Linear securities derive from the assumption that small business financing involves more uncertainty than is captured in most financial models. Instead of assuming that business people are faced with a given menu of projects, the model allows entrepreneurs to create (over time) an unlimited number of non-positive net present value projects with any payoff distribution they desire. Also, outside investors cannot observe project choice but only terminal cash flows. As a result, suppliers of funds must design contracts so that in equilibrium entrepreneurs do not wish to undertake undesirable investments. Further analysis of the model shows that in equilibrium entrepreneurs must contribute some

We view innovation investments as real options and explore the implications of risk (volatility) as well as a newly defined outcome independent measure of ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) for innovation decisions. The empirical analysis uses stock returns to compute an implementable measure of ambiguity. We also control for risk and other determinants of innovation. We find a consistently significant negative effect of ambiguity on R&D, patents, and citations, as predicted. The effect of risk on R&D is positive and significant, but the corresponding effect on patents and citations is negative and significant. Ambiguity matters more for high-tech firms, consistent with intuition.

This paper investigates the optimal sequencing of debt issues. Our theoretical model suggests that once firms issue debt with one level of seniority, they may have an incentive to alternate seniorities, because of violations of the priced absolute priority rule (APR). When we introduce explicit costs of class conflict, the model yields cases of alternating seniorities and other cases in which firms issue only one class of debt. The implications of the model are consistent with the observed regularities in a large database of debt issues. We test several other implications of our model as well.