Midair Refueling for Sensation Seeking? Pilot CEOs and Corporate Debt Contracting

Inventor CEOs and Corporate Innovation

One in four U.S. high-tech firms are led by CEOs with hands-on innovation experience as inventors. We show that these “Inventor CEOs” stimulate higher quality firm-level innovation, especially when they have a personal history of high-impact patents. A CEO’s technology-class specific inventor experience also predicts the technology classes in which a firm has its greatest innovation success. Ut...

Granularity of Corporate Debt∗

We study whether firms spread out debt maturity dates, which we call “granularity of corporate debt.” In our model, firms that are unable to roll over expiring debt need to liquidate assets. If multiple small asset sales are less inefficient than a single large one, it can be optimal to diversify debt rollovers across time. Using a large sample of corporate bond issuers during the 1991–2012 per...

Secured Debt and Corporate Performance:

Agency theory in modern corporate finance suggests the presence of a conflict of interest between managers and shareholders. Prior theoretical and empirical research has identified leverage as an important mechanism that is likely to mitigate agency costs. Although debt plays a central role in mitigating corporate agency conflicts, relatively few studies have examined the implications that aris...

Sensation seeking in adolescents

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...