We explore the significance of employee compensation and alternative (reservation) income on investment timing, endogenous default, yield spreads and capital structure. In a real-options setting, a manager’s incentive to under(over)invest in a project is associated to labor income he has to forego in order to work on the project, the manager’s salary, his stake on the project’s equity capital and his subsequent income, should he decide to terminate operations. We find that the optimal level of coupon payments decreases with managerial salary and ownership stake while it is increasing in the manager’s reservation income. Yield spreads (optimal leverage ratios) are increasing (decreasing) in the manager’s salary and ownership stake, while they are decreasing (increasing) in the manager’s reservation income. Exploring agency costs of debt as deviations from a value-maximizing investment policy, we document a U-shaped relationship between agency costs of debt and the managerial compensation parameters: the manager’s reservation income, salary and ownership share.

In this article, we explore publication patterns in the Journal of Corporate Finance and discuss scientometric results from 1994 to 2017. We document evidence on the number and size of published papers, collaborative research in terms of coauthorship, editorial board characteristics, and citations as approximations of scientific impact. We identify the most prolific individuals and institutions and discuss how published research has exhibited an increasing number of authors per paper (2.38 on average), how the percentage of USA-based affiliations is gradually decreasing, and how 10.32% of published papers have been written by a member of the editorial board. In an attempt to map the social structure of collaboration in the Journal of Corporate Finance, we studied the social network of coauthors and found that the most prolific authors and institutions are also among the most central ones. We also discovered that the network of coauthorship spreads across 470 connected groups of nodes, the largest of which spans 24.63% of the network.