We examine the empirical relation between labor unions and firm indebtedness in the contemporary United States. Our identification strategy exploits two negative exogenous shocks in union power and the threat of unionization. Further, in the context of panel regressions, we develop a novel firm-level proxy for the bargaining power of labor using collective bargaining information from mandatory IRS filings from 1999 to 2013. Across a battery of tests, we document evidence in favor of a crowding-out hypothesis — namely, a substitution effect between labor power and financial leverage. Notably, this effect is more pronounced in firms in labor-intensive and unionized industries.

We examine the effect of mandatory financial disclosures, specifically SFAS 131, on corporate restructuring activities by using difference-in-differences (DiD) and regression discontinuity design (RDD) settings. After the adoption of SFAS 131, firms are less likely to engage in acquisitions than are the control firms. Furthermore, conditional on firms' engagement in acquisition activities, acquirers are less likely to complete their initiated acquisition deals, especially for those value-destroying deals. After the implementation of SFAS 131, we find that the equity market reacts positively to large and diversifying deals that are subject to mandatory segment disclosures. Overall, our results suggest that the segment disclosure standard helped prevent managers from undertaking new, value-destroying M&As post-SFAS 131. Finally, these SFAS 131–induced corporate restructuring activities are shown to help reduce the risk of a stock price crash.

This paper extends our knowledge of corporate debt maturity structure by examining whether and to what extent overconfident CEOs affect maturity decisions. Consistent with a demand side story, we find that firms with overconfident CEOs tend to adopt a shorter debt maturity structure by using a higher proportion of short-term debt (due within 12months). This behavior of overconfident CEOs is not deterred by the high liquidity risk associated with such a financing strategy. Our demand side explanation remains robust even after considering six possible alternative drivers including a competing supply side explanation (in which creditors are reluctant to extend long-term debt to overconfident CEOs).

In this paper, we analyze the impact of leverage deviation (i.e., actual minus target optimal leverage) on the implied cost of equity capital. Our special focus is on whether (and to what extent) the sensitivity of the cost of equity to leverage deviation, influences the speed with which firms adjust their financial leverage toward the target. Confirming theoretical predictions, we find that the cost of equity is positively related to leverage deviation and that firms whose cost of equity is more sensitive to leverage deviation exhibit faster speed of adjustment toward the target. Collectively, our findings imply that capital structure targeting is not equally important to all firms. Indeed, we argue that while evidence of the trade-off theory will tend to be obscured in broad samples, it can hold strongly in meaningfully chosen sub-samples of firms — namely, those characterized by high sensitivity of equity cost to leverage deviation.