The empirical literature provides conflicting assessments about how firms choose their capital structures. Distinguishing among the three main hypotheses (“tradeoff”, pecking order, and market timing) requires that we know whether firms have long-run leverage targets and (if so) how quickly they adjust toward them. Yet many previous researchers have applied empirical specifications that fail to recognize the potential for incomplete adjustment. A more general, partial-adjustment model of firm leverage indicates that firms do have target capital structures. The typical firm closes about one-third of the gap between its actual and its target debt ratios each year.

Because the personal tax treatments of interest and dividend income likely affect the relative cost of debt and equity financing, a sharp change in tax treatment could affect firms' optimal leverage. This paper examines the effect of the 2003 equity income tax cut on firms' debt usage. Because this tax cut affected only individual investors, we can use a difference-in-differences method to identify the effect of personal tax on firms' leverage. Previous research has found that the 2003 tax cut encouraged dividend payouts and reduced the cost of equity, but it provides no link to equilibrium leverage ratios. We estimate that the tax cut causes the affected firms' leverage to decrease by about 5 percentage points. Furthermore, we show that the effects of the tax cut are stronger for firms with lower marginal corporate tax rates and for firms that are not financially constrained, consistent with our theoretical predictions. Overall, we find strong evidence that personal tax is an important determinant of firms' optimal leverage.

Many authors relate a firm's performance to legal and political features and the regulatory environment in which it operates. This article compares firms' capital structure adjustments across countries and investigates whether institutional differences help explain the variance in estimated adjustment speeds. We find that legal and financial traditions significantly correlate with firm adjustment speeds. More narrowly, institutional features also relate to adjustment speeds, consistent with the hypothesis that better institutions lower the transaction costs associated with adjusting a firm's leverage. Such associations between institutional arrangements and leverage adjustment speeds are consistent with the dynamic trade-off theory of capital structure choice.

We assess the market microstructure properties of U.S. banking firms’ equity, to determine whether they exhibit more or less evidence of asset opaqueness than similar-sized nonbanking firms. The evidence indicates that large bank holding companies (BHC), traded on the NYSE, have very similar trading properties to their matched nonfinancial firms. In contrast, smaller BHCs, traded on NASDAQ, trade much less frequently despite having very similar spreads. Analysis of IBES earnings forecasts indicates that banking assets are not unusually opaque; they are simply boring. The implications for regulatory policy and future market microstructure research are discussed.

Recent research has emphasized the impact of transaction costs on firm leverage adjustments. We recognize that cashflow realizations can provide opportunities to adjust leverage at relatively low marginal cost. We find that a firm's cashflow features affect not only the leverage target, but also the speed of adjustment toward that target. Heterogeneity in adjustment speeds is driven by an economically meaningful concept: adjustment costs. Accounting for this fact produces adjustment speeds that are significantly faster than previously estimated in the literature. We also analyze how both financial constraints and market timing variables affect adjustments toward a leverage target.

Prior studies conclude that firms’ equity underperforms following many individual sorts of external financing. These conclusions naturally raise significant questions about market efficiency and/or about the techniques used to measure long-run “abnormal returns.” Rather than concentrating on a single security type or issuance, we examine long-run performance following any and all sorts of security issuances. Initial financing events do not associate with underperformance; however, subsequent financings do. Our results suggest that negative post-issuance returns have nothing to do with the specific type of security issued, and everything to do with the number of types of securities issued.