Over recent years, a substantial fraction of US convertible bond issues have been combined with a stock repurchase. This paper explores the motivations for these combined transactions. We argue that convertible debt issuers repurchase their stock to facilitate arbitrage-related short selling. In line with this prediction, we show that convertibles combined with a stock repurchase are associated with lower offering discounts, lower stock price pressure, higher expected hedging demand, and lower issue-date short selling than uncombined issues. We also find that convertible arbitrage strategies explain both the size and the speed of execution of the stock repurchases.

This paper tests the static tradeoff theory against the pecking order theory. We focus on an important difference in prediction: the static tradeoff theory argues that a firm increases leverage until it reaches its target debt ratio, while the pecking order yields debt issuance until the debt capacity is reached. We find that for our sample of US firms the pecking order theory is a better descriptor of firms’ issue decisions than the static tradeoff theory. In contrast, when we focus on repurchase decisions we find that the static tradeoff theory is a stronger predictor of firms’ capital structure decisions.