A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.
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Leverage cross-sections more than a few years apart differ markedly, with similarities evaporating as the time between them lengthens. Many firms have high and low leverage at different times, but few keep debt-to-assets ratios consistently above 0.500. Capital structure stability is the exception, not the rule, occurs primarily at low leverage, and is virtually always temporary, with many firms abandoning low leverage during the post-war boom. Industry-median leverage varies widely over time. Target-leverage models that place little or no weight on maintaining a particular ratio do a good job replicating the substantial instability of the actual leverage cross-section.
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Liquidity production is a central function of banks. High leverage is optimal for banks in a model that has just enough frictions for banks to have a meaningful role in liquid-claim production. The model has a market premium for (socially valuable) safe/liquid debt, but no taxes or other traditional motives to lever up. Because only safe debt commands a liquidity premium, banks with risky assets use risk management to maximize their capacity to include such debt in the capital structure. The model can explain why banks have higher leverage than most operating firms, why risk management is central to banks׳ operating policies, why bank leverage increased over the last 150 years or so, and why leverage limits for regulated banks impede their ability to compete with unregulated shadow banks.
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Unregulated US corporations dramatically increased their debt usage over the past century. Aggregate leverage—low and stable before 1945—more than tripled between 1945 and 1970 from 11% to 35%, eventually reaching 47% by the early 1990s. The median firm in 1946 had no debt, but by 1970 had a leverage ratio of 31%. This increase occurred in all unregulated industries and affected firms of all sizes. Changing firm characteristics are unable to account for this increase. Rather, changes in government borrowing, macroeconomic uncertainty, and financial sector development play a more prominent role. Despite this increase among unregulated firms, a combination of stable debt usage among regulated firms and a decrease in the fraction of aggregate assets held by regulated firms over this period resulted in a relatively stable economy-wide leverage ratio during the 20th century.
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Using staggered corporate income tax changes across U.S. states, we show that taxes have a first-order effect on capital structure. Firms increase leverage by around 40 basis points for every percentage-point tax increase. Consistent with dynamic tradeoff theory, the effect is asymmetric: leverage does not respond to tax cuts. This is true even within-firm: tax increases that are later reversed nonetheless lead to permanent leverage increases. The treatment effects are heterogeneous and confirm the tax channel: tax sensitivity is greater among profitable and investment-grade firms which respectively have a greater marginal tax benefit and lower marginal cost of issuing debt.
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This paper exploits intertemporal variations in employment protection across countries and finds that rigidities in labor markets are an important determinant of firms' capital structure decisions. Over the 1985–2007 period, we find that reforms increasing employment protection are associated with a 187 basis point reduction in leverage. We interpret this finding to suggest that employment protection increases operating leverage, crowding out financial leverage. This result does not appear to be due to pretreatment differences between treated and control firms, omitted variables, unobserved changes in regional economic conditions, and reverse causality. Heterogeneous treatment effects are consistent with our economic intuition.