We construct firm-level indexes for agency conflicts between controlling shareholders and outside investors by estimating a dynamic model of financing decisions. Our estimates for 12,652 firms from 14 countries show that agency conflicts are large and highly variable across firms and countries. Differences in agency conflicts are largely due to differences in firm-level governance, ownership concentration, and other firm characteristics. The origin of law is more relevant for curtailing governance excesses than for guarding the typical firm. Agency costs split about equally between wealth transfers and value losses from policy distortions. Recent governance reforms in Europe have significantly reduced agency costs.

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager–shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. In the model, firms face taxation, refinancing costs, and liquidation costs. Managers own a fraction of the firms’ equity, capture part of the free cash flow to equity as private benefits, and have control over financing decisions. Using data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we find that agency costs of 1.5% of equity value on average are sufficient to resolve the low‐leverage puzzle and to explain the dynamics of leverage ratios. Our estimates also reveal that agency costs vary significantly across firms and correlate with commonly used proxies for corporate governance.

Capital ages and must eventually be replaced. We propose a theory of financing in which firms borrow to finance investment and deleverage as capital ages to have enough financial slack to finance replacement investments. To achieve these dynamics, firms issue debt with a maturity that matches the useful life of assets and a repayment schedule that reflects the need to free up debt capacity as capital ages. In the model, leverage and debt maturity are negatively related to capital age while debt maturity and the length of debt cycles are positively related to asset life. We provide empirical evidence that strongly supports these predictions.

We develop a dynamic model of banking to assess the effects of liquidity and leverage requirements on banks’ financing decisions and insolvency risk. In this model, banks face taxation, issuance costs of securities, and default costs and maximize shareholder value by choosing their debt-to-asset ratio, deposits-to-debt ratio, liquid asset holdings, equity issuance and default policies in response to these frictions as well as regulatory requirements. Our analytic characterization of the bank policy choices shows that imposing liquidity requirements leads to lower bank losses in default at the cost of an increased likelihood of default. Combining liquidity and leverage requirements reduces both the likelihood of default and the magnitude of bank losses in default.

This paper analyzes the interaction between financial leverage and takeover activity. We develop a dynamic model of takeovers in which the financing strategies of bidding firms and the timing and terms of takeovers are jointly determined. In the paper, capital structure plays the role of a commitment device, and determines the outcome of the acquisition contest. We demonstrate that there exists an asymmetric equilibrium in financing policies with endogenous leverage, bankruptcy, and takeover terms, in which the bidder with the lowest leverage wins the takeover contest. Based on the resulting equilibrium, the model generates a number of new predictions. In particular, the model predicts that the leverage of the winning bidder is below the industry average and that acquirers should lever up after the takeover consummation. The model also relates the dispersion in leverage ratios to various industry characteristics, such as cash flow volatility or bankruptcy costs.

Most firms face some form of competition in product markets. The degree of competition a firm faces feeds back into its cash flows and affects the values of the securities it issues. Through its effects on stock prices, product market competition affects the prices of options on equity and leads to an inverse relationship between equity returns and volatility, generating a negative volatility skew in option prices. Using a large sample of U.S. equity options, we provide empirical support for this finding and demonstrate the importance of accounting for product market competition when explaining the cross-sectional variation in option skew. Received June 28, 2017; editorial decision October 23, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished supplementary Internet Appendices, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the impact of macroeconomic conditions on credit risk and dynamic capital structure choice. We begin by observing that when cash flows depend on current economic conditions, there will be a benefit for firms to adapt their default and financing policies to the position of the economy in the business cycle phase. We then demonstrate that this simple observation has a wide range of empirical implications for corporations. Notably, we show that our model can replicate observed debt levels and the countercyclicality of leverage ratios. We also demonstrate that it can reproduce the observed term structure of credit spreads and generate strictly positive credit spreads for debt contracts with very short maturities. Finally, we characterize the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the pace and size of capital structure changes, and debt capacity.

This paper develops a real options framework to analyze the behavior of stock returns in mergers and acquisitions. In this framework, the timing and terms of takeovers are endogenous and result from value‐maximizing decisions. The implications of the model for abnormal announcement returns are consistent with the available empirical evidence. In addition, the model generates new predictions regarding the dynamics of firm‐level betas for the period surrounding control transactions. Using a sample of 1,086 takeovers of publicly traded U.S. firms between 1985 and 2002, we present new evidence on the dynamics of firm‐level betas, which is strongly supportive of the model's predictions.

We challenge the view that short-term debt curbs moral hazard and demonstrate that, in a world with financing frictions and fair debt pricing, short-term debt generates incentives for risk-taking. To do so, we develop a model in which firms are financed with equity and short-term debt and cannot freely optimize their default decision because of financing frictions. We show that when firms are close to distress, the dynamic interaction of operating and rollover losses fuels default risk. In such instances, shareholders find it optimal to increase asset risk to improve interim debt repricing and prevent inefficient liquidation. These risk-taking incentives do not arise when debt maturity is sufficiently long.

We develop a model in which a start-up firm issues tokens to finance a digital platform, which creates agency conflicts between platform developers and outsiders. We show that token financing is preferred to equity financing unless the platform expects strong cash flows, has large financing needs, or faces severe agency conflicts. Tokens are characterized by their utility features, facilitating transactions, and security features, granting cash flow rights. While security features trigger endogenous network effects and spur platform adoption, they also dilute developers’ equity stake and incentives so that the optimal level of security features decreases with agency conflicts and financing needs.