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.

Stock market returns are significantly correlated with inflation and money growth. The impact of real macroeconomic variables on aggregate equity returns has been difficult to establish, perhaps because their effects are neither linear nor time invariant. We estimate a GARCH model of daily equity returns, where realized returns and their conditional volatility depend on 17 macro series' announcements. We find six candidates for priced factors: three nominal (CPI, PPI, and a Monetary Aggregate) and three real (Balance of Trade, Employment Report, and Housing Starts). Popular measures of overall economic activity, such as Industrial Production or GNP are not represented.

Previous research demonstrates that a firm's common stock price tends to fall when it issues new public securities. By contrast, commercial bank loans elicit significantly positive borrower returns. This article investigates whether the lender's identity influences the market's reaction to a loan announcement. Although the authors find no significant difference between the market's response to bank and nonbank loans, they do find that lenders with a higher credit rating are associated with larger abnormal borrower returns. This evidence complements earlier findings that an auditor's or investment banker's perceived 'quality' signals valuable information about firm value to uninformed market investors.

A firm's working-capital account balances demonstrate substantial connections with its financial policy. Receivables and inventories are associated with lower asset volatility and higher future cash flow, and correlate with increased leverage. Conversely, payables show a positive association with shareholder return volatility and a negative correlation with future cash flow and are linked to decreased debt levels. In dynamic panel regressions estimated with system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), a one standard-deviation increase in payables (receivables) is associated with a 0.42 (0.66) standard-deviation decrease (increase) in leverage. Furthermore, higher levels of inventories and receivables are linked with higher firm credit ratings, along with a preference for debt financing over equity issuance, while increased payables are linked with lower credit ratings and a tendency to favor equity financing over debt financing. The QuickPay regulatory shock, expediting payments and reducing receivables' volume and quality, diminished their collateral role and lowered debt sensitivity to receivables.

The authors investigate the extent to which intra‐week seasonality still exists and whether its pattern is uniform across three stock indices and Treasury bonds with seven different maturities. They find that intra‐week seasonality continues to be significant and that its pattern is not uniform, either between the stock indices and the Treasury bonds or even among the bonds alone. A pattern shared by stocks and bonds is that Monday returns become increasingly negative with maturity. These findings suggest that neither institutional nor general‐equilibriumex planations by themselves can explain the pattern of intra‐week seasonality in securities markets.

Government securities; Interest rates; Seasonal variations (Economics); Stock - Prices

Doubts about the accuracy with which outside investors can assess a banking firm’s value motivate many government interventions in the banking market. Although the available empirical evidence is somewhat mixed, the recent financial crisis has reinforced a common assessment that banks are unusually opaque. This paper examines bank equity’s trading characteristics during “normal” periods and two “crisis” periods between 1993 and 2009. We find only limited (mixed) evidence that banks are unusually opaque during normal periods. However, consistent with theory, crises raise the adverse selection costs of trading bank shares relative to those of nonbank control firms. A bank’s balance sheet composition significantly affects its equity opacity, but we cannot detect specific balance sheet categories that have robust effects.

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.