Human Capital,Bankruptcy, and Capital Structure

We derive the optimal labor contract for a levered firm in an economy with perfectly competitive capital and labor markets. Employees become entrenched under this contract and so face large human costs of bankruptcy. The firm's optimal capital structure therefore depends on the trade‐off between these human costs and the tax benefits of debt. Optimal debt levels consistent with those observed in practice emerge without relying on frictions such as moral hazard or asymmetric information. Consistent with empirical evidence, persistent idiosyncratic differences in leverage across firms also result. In addition, wages should have explanatory power for firm leverage.     

The global financial crisis and the capital structure of firms: Was the impact more severe among SMEs and non-listed firms?

Using a dataset covering about 276,998 firms across 75 countries over the period 2004–2011, this paper examines the short-run evolution of firms' capital structures following the start of the global financial crisis and its immediate aftermath, comparing the experience of already levered SMEs, large non-listed firms, and listed companies. We find that firm leverage and debt maturity declined both in advanced economies and in developing countries, even in those that did not experience a crisis. The deleveraging and maturity reduction were particularly significant for non-listed firms, including both SMEs as well as large non-listed companies. For SMEs, these effects were larger in countries with less efficient legal systems, weaker information sharing mechanisms, less developed financial sectors, and with more restrictions on bank entry. In contrast, there is weaker evidence of a significant decline in leverage and debt maturity among listed companies which are typically much larger than other firms and likely to benefit from the “spare tire” of easier access to capital market financing. Though our results are robust to many changes in sample and specification, we cannot rule out that survivorship bias and attrition could affect our estimates to some degree.     

EXCHANGEABLE DEBT CALLS AND SECURITY RETURNS

Exchangeable calls are not convertible into the calling firm's common stock but into the common stock of a target firm in which the calling firm has an ownership position. In addition to reducing leverage, exchangeables change the asset composition of the calling firm through the divestiture of the calling firm's ownership stake in the target firm. In contrast to the evidence on convertible calls, our findings indicate that announcements of exchangeable debt calls are not associated with an abnormal capital loss for the calling firm shareholders. For target firms, announcements of exchangeable calls reduce shareholder wealth. A lower probability of takeover resulting from diffusion of ownership concentration of the target firm's common stock may contribute to this result.     

The Effects of Ownership Structure and Intragroup Loans on Leverage: Evidence from Family Firms in Chile

This article examines the effects of family control and pyramidal ownership on firms’ capital structure decisions. After studying a sample of listed family and nonfamily firms in Chile, we find that families take a conservative approach to debt and financial risk exposure. We test the hypothesis that family firms restrict the use of debt in order to avoid the monitoring role of creditors, which could limit their enjoyment of the private benefits of control. In keeping with this hypothesis, we find a U-shaped relationship between leverage and the degree of pyramidal ownership that is more pronounced among family firms than nonfamily firms. We do not find any evidence that is consistent with the hypothesis that family-controlled firms have low leverage ratios due to their access to internal capital markets. In fact, conversely, we find that listed family firms provide more loans to related companies than comparable nonfamily firms.     

Back to the Beginning: Persistence and the Cross-Section of Corporate Capital Structure

We find that the majority of variation in leverage ratios is driven by an unobserved time-invariant effect that generates surprisingly stable capital structures: High (low) levered firms tend to remain as such for over two decades. This feature of leverage is largely unexplained by previously identified determinants, is robust to firm exit, and is present prior to the IPO, suggesting that variation in capital structures is primarily determined by factors that remain stable for long periods of time. We then show that these results have important implications for empirical analysis attempting to understand capital structure heterogeneity.     

Valuation and Cost of Capital Formulae with Corporate and Personal Taxes: A Synthesis Using the Dempsey Discounted Dividends Model

This paper advances expressions for the firm's valuation and cost of capital as a function of leverage. The framework is arrived at by introducing leverage in Dempsey's (1996 and 1998) cost of capital framework and is applicable in the context of both classical and imputation tax systems. The framework reveals that both the historical stability of corporate leverage and the firm's choice of financing structure as revealed by the Pecking Order hypothesis are consistent with a tax-based explanation.     

Capital structure with risky foreign investment

Firms facing significant business risks have incentives to mitigate the costs of these risks by adjusting their capital structures. This paper investigates this link by analyzing the exposures of multinational firms to political risk. The evidence indicates that returns on investment in politically risky countries are more volatile than returns elsewhere. Multinational firms reduce their leverage in response to these political risks: a one standard deviation increase in foreign political risk is associated with 3.5% reduced leverage. The effect of foreign political risks on leverage is most pronounced for firms in industries whose returns are most susceptible to political influence.     

Are the benefits of debt declining? The decreasing propensity of firms to be adequately levered

We observe a persistent increase in the percentage of firms with little or no debt in their capital structure over the last three decades. The fraction of firms with less than five percent debt in their capital structure increases from 14.01 percent in 1977 to 34.42 percent in 2010 while the percentage of all-equity firms increases 200 percent over the same period. We find that even after controlling for firm- and industry-specific variables that are relevant to capital structure policy, there is a deficiency in firms' propensity to be levered. Additionally, the deficiency is increasing over time and by 2010 the percent of firms that are nearly all-equity is twice the predicted level. Our findings are robust to different methodologies, specifications, and time periods. Overall, these results suggest that the well-documented benefits of leverage are less valuable over the sample period and that the determinants of firms' capital structure decisions have evolved since the 1970s.     

Levered Returns

This paper revisits the theoretical relation between financial leverage and stock returns in a dynamic world where both corporate investment and financing decisions are endogenous. We find that the link between leverage and stock returns is more complex than static textbook examples suggest, and depends on the investment opportunities available to the firm. In the presence of financial market imperfections, leverage and investment are generally correlated so that highly levered firms are also mature firms with relatively more (safe) book assets and fewer (risky) growth opportunities. A quantitative version of our model matches several stylized facts about leverage and returns.     

The peer effect of corporate financial decisions around split share structure reform in China

We examine the peer effects in financial decisions of Chinese listed companies for the period of 1998–2016 as well as around Split Share Structure Reform (SSSR). Consistent with the information‐based theory of learning, Chinese firms do adjust their capital structure in response to the changes in their peers’ market leverage ratios. The industries that are more competitive, with more young firms, and high leverage volatility tend to exhibit stronger peer effects. Within industries, the firms with lower market share and profits, paying no dividends, and being financially constrained mimic their peers more strongly than their counterparts. The evidence around the SSSR reveals that firms tend to follow their industry peers and leaders more closely in making financial decisions after the reform. Finally, the mimicking behavior in financial decisions enhances firm value in the long run and this finding is more evident after the reform.     

经营负债杠杆与金融负债杠杆效应的差异性检验

本文将企业的负债划分为经营负债与金融负债,以2001—2005年期间沪深两市A股上市公司为样本,比较检验了经营负债杠杆与金融负债杠杆对公司创值能力和成长性影响的差异性。结果发现:①经营负债杠杆比金融负债杠杆对公司的创值能力和成长性产生更大更显著的积极效应,即拥有更多的经营负债更能提升公司的创值能力和成长性;②两种负债的杠杆效应均存在"规模效应",即公司的规模越小,杠杆效应越强;③金融负债杠杆与经营负债杠杆具有显著的互补性,即随着金融负债杠杆比率的增加,经营负债杠杆效应会显著增强;反之亦然。显然,本文的研究结论对企业制定其负债安排策略具有一定的启示意义。     

Voluntary disclosure of corporate venture capital investments

In this paper, we investigate drivers of corporate venture capital investment announcements. Consistent with voluntary information disclosure theories, we find that a public announcement is less likely to be made when the start-up firm is in the seed stage but more likely when the parent company is large, active in concentrated markets and in non-high-tech industries; spends heavily on internal R&D and capital expenditures; has low leverage ratio; and faces more information asymmetry problems. In addition, corporate venture capital programs managed externally disclose more often than internal programs. We find that parent companies facing more severe asymmetric information problems enjoy the highest abnormal returns in response to announcements. This study contributes to the literature on voluntary information disclosure in that it evidences that larger corporations use disclosure of some of their investments in innovative startups strategically as a way to convey valuable information to the market.     

How Big is the Tax Advantage to Debt?

This paper uses an option valuation model of the firm to answer the question, “What magnitude tax advantage to debt is consistent with the range of observed corporate debt ratios?” We incorporate into the model differential personal tax rates on capital gains and ordinary income. We conclude that variations in the magnitude of bankruptcy costs across firms can not by itself account for the simultaneous existence of levered and unlevered firms. When it is possible for the value of the underlying assets to jump discretely to zero, differences across firms in the probability of this jump can account for the simultaneous existence of levered and unlevered firms. Moreover, if the tax advantage to debt is small, the annual rate of return advantage offered by optimal leverage may be so small as to make the firm indifferent about debt policy over a wide range of debt-to-firm value ratios.     

A NOTE ON THE SUPERIORITY OF LEVERED SHARES UNDER THE POSITIVE NPV RULE

The purpose of this note is to demonstrate that under the market conditions upon which the validity of the positive NPV rule in capital budgeting depends, levered shares will on average out-perform unlevered shares to a degree which more than compensates for the additional risk.
Dans ce papier, on démontre que - dans les conditions du marché dont dépend la validité du principe de la valeur actuelle nette relative aubudget en capital - les titres sujets au leverage donneront en moyenne de meilleurs rendements que ceux qui ne le sont pas, couvrant ainsi largement le risque supplémentaire.
Der Zweck dieser Amerkung ist es zu zeigen, dass unter den Marktbedingungen, mvon die Gültigkeit der Kapitalwertmethode im Rahmen der Investitionsplanung abhägt, die Aktienrendite eines verschuldeten Unternehmens die Aktienrendite eines nicht-verschuldeten Unternehmens hinsichtlich des Verschuldungsrisikos überkompensiert.     

Safety Transformation and the Structure of the Financial System

This paper studies how a financial system that is organized to efficiently create safe assets responds to macroeconomic shocks. Financial intermediaries face a cost of bearing risk, so they choose the least risky portfolio that backs their issuance of riskless deposits: a diversified pool of nonfinancial firms' debt. Nonfinancial firms choose their capital structure to exploit the resulting segmentation between debt and equity markets. Increased safe asset demand yields larger and riskier intermediaries and more levered firms. Quantitative easing reduces the size and riskiness of intermediaries and can decrease firm leverage, despite reducing borrowing costs at the zero lower bound.     

Customer concentration,leverage adjustments,and firm value

We examine the relationship between customer concentration and capital structure adjustment speed using a sample of US listed firms from 1977 to 2020. We found that the customer-concentrated firms have a lower speed of leverage adjustment. Customer concentration affects leverage adjustment speed mainly through increased cash flow volatility and asset specificity. The negative association is more pronounced in firms with high relationship-specific investments and low switching costs for their customers. Stock market reacts to leverage deviation strongly for firms with concentrated customers. Our findings highlight the vital role of customers as key stakeholders in capital structure decisions.     

Multinationals do it better: Evidence on the efficiency of corporations' capital budgeting

With U.S. multinational enterprises playing increasingly important roles in the global economy, it is important to understand the efficiency of their capital budgeting decisions. We examine an unbalanced panel of 332 U.S. firms from 1992–2000. Using the deviation of a firm's estimated marginal Tobin's q from a benchmark as an indicator of effective resource allocation, we find that widespread multinationals make more efficient capital budgeting decisions. We also test whether this reflects the MNEs' investment locations, but do not obtain support for the hypotheses that they might be monitored by more agents or more successfully resist pressures from interest groups and governments.     

杠杆率变动、固定资产投资与研发活动——兼论金融赋能高质量发展

本文通过构建一个包含企业固定资产投资与研发投资的理论模型,分析得出企业杠杆率变动与投资行为的非线性关系。实证结果表明,低杠杆下,杠杆率的增大会使企业增加固定资产和研发投资的规模。对于财务柔性更强、发展前景更好的企业,杠杆率的提升能够增大此类企业的研发投入占比,即企业开展更多能够提升技术水平的研发活动。进一步研究发现,短期杠杆与商业信用杠杆的提升有助于财务柔性较好的企业提高研发投资占比,而对于发展前景不佳的僵尸企业,长期杠杆和银行杠杆的提升反而会使其扩大固定资产投资,加剧产能过剩问题。本文的政策含义在于,要在保持宏观杠杆率基本稳定的前提下,引导金融资源更多投入到创新型经济上,给予优质及前景较好的企业一定杠杆率调整空间和自由度,使其能够更好地利用社会资金,激励其开展研发活动,促进金融更好地服务实体经济,赋能高质量发展。     

Predicting systematic risk: Implications from growth options

In accordance with the well-known financial leverage effect, decreases in stock prices cause an increase in the levered equity beta for a given unlevered beta. However, as growth options are more volatile and have higher risk than assets in place, a price decrease may decrease the unlevered equity beta via an operating leverage effect. This is because price decreases are associated with a proportionately higher loss in growth options than in assets in place. Most of the existing literature focuses on the financial leverage effect: This paper examines both effects. We show, with a simple option pricing model, the opposing effects at work when the firm is a portfolio of assets in place and growth options. Our empirical results show that, contrary to common belief, the operating leverage effect largely dominates the financial leverage effect, even for initially highly levered firms with presumably few growth options. We then link variations in betas to measurable firm characteristics that proxy for the fraction of the firm invested in growth options. We show that these proxies jointly predict a large fraction of future cross-sectional differences in betas. These results have important implications on the predictability of equity betas, hence on empirical asset pricing and on portfolio optimization that controls for systematic risk.     

Local social environment and the speed of leverage adjustment

This study examines the impact of social capital on firms’ leverage adjustment speed. Using a comprehensive dataset of 83,374 firm-year observations for 744 US counties for 1990–2016, we find that both underleveraged and overleveraged firms located in US counties with higher levels of social capital incur slower leverage adjustment towards their optimal target capital structure. This finding is robust to alternative measures of leverage and social capital, different model specifications, controlling for county- and firm-level characteristics, and endogeneity. We further identify two mechanisms through which social capital affects leverage adjustments: monitoring (channel for underleveraged firms) and disciplinary (channel for overleveraged firms) mechanisms.