This paper examines whether promotion-based tournament incentives affect corporate dividend payouts. Using the pay gap between the CEO and non-CEO executives as a proxy for tournament incentives, we find that tournament incentives are negatively related to corporate dividends. Further analyses show that the negative effect is stronger in firms that are financially constrained, have volatility in cash flows and earnings, and operate in less homogeneous industries. We also provide evidence that tournament incentives are positively related to payout flexibility. Our findings are consistent with the notion that firms reduce dividends to mitigate potential cash shortfalls associated with increased risk-taking induced by tournament incentives.

This paper presents evidence that firms conserve cash to manage employees' perceptions of the risk of becoming unemployed. Employing a matched sample design and using state level changes in unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to proxy for unemployment risk, we test the hypothesis that cash holdings and unemployment risk are positively related. We find an economically and statistically significant decrease in cash holdings after an increase in UI benefits (i.e., lower unemployment risk). Robust to alternative specifications, our findings also suggest that the positive relation between cash holdings and unemployment risk is more pronounced for firms that are more labor intensive, have a high layoff propensity, have a higher fraction of low-wage workers, and are in industries with a higher fraction of UI recipients. Overall, our results are consistent with the idea that cash holdings are affected by not only shareholders but also other stakeholders: namely employees.

U.S. firms lease assets extensively. We find that, during 1980–2011, the average U.S. firm has a lease intensity of about 40%. Or, the average firm has present and future (up to five years) rent commitments equal to 16.6% of their total assets. We investigate whether agency costs between the lessor and the lessee affect the lease intensity of firms. To do so, we examine the impact of firms' location on the use of operating leases. The main idea of our paper is that, because obtaining information and monitoring is costly for potential lessors, especially when a lessee is relatively far away from financial centers, rural firms are less likely to use operating leases. Consistent with this hypothesis, we show that rural firms tend to have lower lease intensities than similar urban and small city firms. In addition, we find that firms with higher levels of debt capacity lease less and firms that face more financial constraint lease more. Our findings are robust to industry and lease maturity controls and consistent with the existence of an agency problem associated with leasing.

This paper investigates the effect of firms’ tournament-based incentives (TI) on leasing. Measuring TI as the pay gap between the chief executive officer (CEO) and non-CEO executives, we find that firms with higher TI have a higher propensity to lease than purchase assets. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that this positive association is stronger for firms with high information asymmetry, low creditworthiness, and high cash-flow uncertainty. Consistent with “financial contracting” motivations of the lease suggested by Smith and Wakeman (1985), our findings indicate that, when risky corporate activities induced by TI lead to an increased agency cost of debt, leasing could more likely be used to economize on the costly external finances.

This paper examines the impact of debt covenants on the speed of capital structure adjustment. Overall, we find that covenants lower the speed of adjustment by 10–13%, relative to the speed of adjustment of firms without covenants. The speed of adjustment is significantly lower, by 40–50%, for firms with the most intense covenant provisions. In particular, we find that capital covenants, as opposed to performance covenants, appear to be the main mechanism that lowers the speed of adjustment, delaying the speed of capital structure adjustment by 86%. We find that the speed of adjustment is reduced more for strict capital covenants than for strict performance covenants. We also show that, for firms that are cash and financially constrained, covenants impede the speed of adjustment even more. Lastly, we show that the negative relationship between covenants and the speed of adjustment is more pronounced for firms that are over-levered.