Applying a machine-learning algorithm to a large sample of U.S. public firms, we document that more than 30% of the firms substantially alter debt structures in a year, even when leverage ratio is stable, when short-term debt is trivial, and when little cash outlay is required for operations. The instability of debt structure reveals new costs of financial constraints: compared to high-credit-quality firms, low-credit-quality firms have to change debt structure more frequently to accommodate their financing needs, even with increased borrowing costs; low-credit-quality firms lack the opportunity available to high-credit-quality firms to reduce borrowing costs through switching debt instruments.

In this paper, we provide several theoretically relevant and empirically significant improvements to the general affine realized volatility (GARV) model of Christoffersen et al. (2014). We impose hidden volatility components in both the return-based conditional variance and the realized variance and augment their combination with another jump component. This new composition nests within a common framework several empirically well-tested models such as the GARV model mentioned above. To facilitate practical implementations we obtain the closed-form formulas to evaluate VIX and its futures through a variance-dependent kernel. Our empirical studies demonstrate that the volatility-component specification provides a further evident improvement in VIX forecasting and its futures pricing across maturity and volatility levels; more importantly, these hybrid and hidden features turn out to be complements rather than substitutes, and their prominence is further intensified by the jump.

Siblings are important sources of support. Male siblings, in particular, are valuable extended family resources in patriarchal societies such as China. This paper examines the effects of the number of brothers on household stock market participation in China. We find that having more brothers increases both the probability of stock market participation and the portfolio share in stocks. This positive effect is more pronounced for individuals who face high income risk, suffer from poor health, lack private insurance, and reside in areas with low financial development and high gender discrimination. In addition, the brother effect persists in recent periods. This evidence highlights the importance of informal risk-sharing networks in household investment decisions. Our results imply that demographic changes such as fertility decline might have unnoticed but sizable impacts on household portfolio choice, especially in countries with strong family ties.