Financial Leverage and Debt Maturity Targeting: International Evidence

Institutions, Financial Markets, and Firms' Choice of Debt Maturity

Leverage and corporate performance: International evidence

Article history: Received 5 December 2011 Received in revised form 10 July 2012 Accepted 10 July 2012 Available online 20 July 2012 This paper analyzes the effect of financial leverage on corporate operating performance and how this effect varies across countries. Results for 10,375 firms in 39 countries indicate that the performance of firms with greater leverage is significantly reduced compa...

Optimal Government Debt Maturity

This paper develops a model of optimal government debt maturity in which the government cannot issue state-contingent bonds and cannot commit to fiscal policy. If the government can perfectly commit, it fully insulates the economy against government spending shocks by purchasing short-term assets and issuing long-term debt. These positions are quantitatively very large relative to GDP and do no...

Corporate Debt Maturity Profiles ∗

We study a novel aspect of a firm’s capital structure, namely the profile of its debt maturity dates. In a simple theoretical framework we show that the dispersion of debt maturities constitutes an important dimension of capital structure choice, driven by firm characteristics and debt rollover risk. Guided by these results we establish two main empirical results. First, using an exogenous shoc...

The joint determination of leverage and maturity

We examine theories of leverage and debt maturity, focusing on the impact of firms’ investment opportunity sets and regulatory environments in determining these policies. Using results on strategic complementarities, we identify sufficient conditions for the theory to have testable implications for reduced-form and structural-equation regression coefficients. Obtaining testable implications for...