A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.
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Results 9 resources
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We solve for a firm's optimal cash holding policy within a continuous time, contingent claims framework using dividends, short-term borrowing, and equity issues as controls assuming mean reversion of earnings. Optimal cash is non-monotone in business conditions and increasing in the level of long-term debt. The model matches closely a wide range of empirical benchmarks and predicts cash and leverage dynamics in line with the empirical literature. Firm value is quite insensitive to changes in the level of long-term debt. The model has interesting implications for asset substitution, hedging, and pecking order. Growth opportunities do not greatly affect cash holding policy.
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We use an important legal event to examine the effect of managerial fiduciary duties on equity-debt conflicts. A 1991 legal ruling changed corporate directors' fiduciary duties in Delaware firms, limiting managers' incentives to take actions that favor equity over debt for distressed firms. After this, affected firms responded by increasing equity issues and investment and by reducing risk. The ruling was also followed by an increase in leverage, reduced reliance on covenants, and higher values. Fiduciary duties appear to affect equity-bondholder conflicts in a way that is economically important, has impact on ex ante capital structure choices, and affects welfare.
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This paper studies the relationship between firm leverage and supplier market structure. We find that firm leverage decreases with the degree of competition between suppliers. Specifically, leverage decreases with the elasticity of substitution between suppliers. Leverage also decreases with the number of suppliers when the elasticity of substitution is high, and increases with the number of suppliers when the elasticity is low. We also provide empirical evidence that is consistent with the model predictions.
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We find that firms behave consistently with how their CEOs behave personally in the context of leverage choices. Analyzing data on CEOs' leverage in their most recent primary home purchases, we find a positive, economically relevant, robust relation between corporate and personal leverage in the cross-section and when examining CEO turnovers. The results are consistent with an endogenous matching of CEOs to firms based on preferences, as well as with CEOs imprinting their personal preferences on the firms they manage, particularly when governance is weaker. Besides enhancing our understanding of the determinants of corporate capital structures, the broader contribution of the paper is to show that CEOs' personal behavior can, in part, explain corporate financial behavior of the firms they manage.
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Firms that intentionally increase leverage through substantial debt issuances do so primarily as a response to operating needs rather than a desire to make a large equity payout. Subsequent debt reductions are neither rapid, nor the result of proactive attempts to rebalance the firm's capital structure toward a long-run target. Instead, the evolution of the firm's leverage ratio depends primarily on whether or not the firm produces a financial surplus. In fact, firms that generate subsequent deficits tend to cover these deficits predominantly with more debt even though they exhibit leverage ratios that are well above estimated target levels. Our findings are broadly consistent with a capital structure theory in which financial flexibility, in the form of unused debt capacity, plays an important role in capital structure choices.
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Many authors relate a firm's performance to legal and political features and the regulatory environment in which it operates. This article compares firms' capital structure adjustments across countries and investigates whether institutional differences help explain the variance in estimated adjustment speeds. We find that legal and financial traditions significantly correlate with firm adjustment speeds. More narrowly, institutional features also relate to adjustment speeds, consistent with the hypothesis that better institutions lower the transaction costs associated with adjusting a firm's leverage. Such associations between institutional arrangements and leverage adjustment speeds are consistent with the dynamic trade-off theory of capital structure choice.
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We study the interaction between financing and investment decisions in a dynamic model, where the firm has multiple debt issues and equityholders choose the timing of investment. Jointly optimal capital and priority structures can virtually eliminate investment distortions because debt priority serves as a dynamically optimal contract. Examining the relative efficiency of priority rules observed in practice, we develop several predictions about how firms adjust their priority structure in response to changes in leverage, credit conditions, and firm fundamentals. Notably, financially unconstrained firms with few growth opportunities prefer senior debt, while financially constrained firms, with or without growth opportunities, prefer junior debt. Moreover, lower-rated firms are predicted to spread priority across debt classes. Finally, our analysis has a number of important implications for empirical capital structure research, including the relations between market leverage, book leverage, and credit spreads and Tobin's Q, the influence of firm fundamentals on the agency cost of debt, and the conservative debt policy puzzle.
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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.
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Firms experiencing increases in import competition significantly reduce their leverage ratios by issuing equity and selling assets to repay debt. Using import tariffs and foreign exchange rates as instrumental variables for import penetration, I show that these results are not manifestations of endogenous relations between import competition and leverage. The results are consistent with traditional trade-off models of capital structure that predict a positive relation between book leverage and expected future profitability. Further evidence suggests that import competition affects leverage through changes in the trade-off between the tax benefits of debt and the costs of financial distress.
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- Capital Structure
- CEO (1)
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- Journal Article (9)