Firms experiencing increases in import competition significantly reduce their leverage ratios by issuing equity and selling assets to repay debt. Using import tariffs and foreign exchange rates as instrumental variables for import penetration, I show that these results are not manifestations of endogenous relations between import competition and leverage. The results are consistent with traditional trade-off models of capital structure that predict a positive relation between book leverage and expected future profitability. Further evidence suggests that import competition affects leverage through changes in the trade-off between the tax benefits of debt and the costs of financial distress.

We use a multitude of tax reforms across the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries as natural experiments to estimate the market value of the tax benefits of debt financing. We report time-series evidence that tax reforms are followed by large changes in the value of corporate equity. However, the impact of tax reforms is greatly mitigated by the presence of leverage. The value of debt tax savings is greater among top taxpayers, among highly profitable firms, and in countries where tax laws are more strongly enforced. Importantly, the value of debt tax savings is in line with the benchmark implied by a traditional approach.

We find that aggregate profitability and asset investment exhibit robust joint predictive power for aggregate excess stock returns, consistent with the investment model of Hou, Xue, and Zhang (henceforth HXZ, 2015). These results provide out-of-sample empirical support for HXZ, as the same mechanisms that HXZ use to explain firm-specific variation in stock returns can also be used to explain variation that is market-wide in nature. Also consistent with the HXZ investment model, we find that the growth rate of short-term (long-term) assets exhibits a stronger predictive power for one-year-ahead (two-year-ahead) stock returns.