We use the staggered introduction of a major financial reporting regulation worldwide as an exogenous shock to the information environment of individual companies and study whether treated firms change financing decisions consistent with the pecking-order theory. Exploiting within country-year variation in firms’ financing frictions, we document that financially constrained firms increase the i...

Introduction Most small firms will never be able to raise all the funding they would like from banks and other institutions. In this crude sense there will always be a deficiency in the funding of the sector equal to the difference between the total demand for funding and that part of this demand which qualifies for funding support. This paper focuses more narrowly on the debt versus equity pre...

This paper studies how the degree of contract enforcement in a country influences firms’ financing decisions. We first document empirical facts on debt financing for two new firm-level datasets in the United Kingdom and Ecuador. In the United Kingdom, small firms borrow more relative to their assets than large firms, whereas in Ecuador small firms borrow less. We build a dynamic model of firms’...

A structural econometric investigation of the agency theory of financial structure We estimate a structural model of financing choices in presence of managerial moral hazard, financial distress costs and taxes. In the theoretical model, firms with low cost of managerial effort, and high financial distress costs and non–debt tax shields, find it optimal to issue equity. Correspondingly the likel...

This paper integrates the problem of designing corporate bankruptcy rules into a theory of optimal debt structure. We show that, in an optimal contracting framework with imperfect renegotiation, having multiple creditors increases a firm’s debt capacity while increasing its incentives to default strategically. The optimal debt contract gives creditors claims that are jointly inconsistent in cas...

We develop a dynamic incomplete-markets model of entrepreneurial firms, and demonstrate the implications of nondiversifiable risks for entrepreneurs’ interdependent consumption, portfolio allocation, financing, investment, and business exit decisions. We characterize the optimal capital structure via a generalized tradeoff model where risky debt provides significant diversification benefits. No...

The present paper first discusses theoretically the different incentives of managerversus owner-controlled firms for investment into innovative activity. In addition, the role of debt financing is analyzed. Subsequently the results from an empirical study on the determinants of innovative activity measured by patent applications are presented. A sample of German firms covering 2,793 observation...

Short-term debt financing played an important role in the run-up to the financial crisis, as increases in leverage helped boost growth, but also made the economy more susceptible to a sharp downturn. Since the recession, private agents have reduced their debt level while many governments have increased borrowing. This deleveraging process appears to be holding back the recovery, and the Japanes...

The pecking order hypothesis predicts that equity costs exceed debt costs when managers require outside funding. Asymmetric information costs motivates this hypothesis. I use an econometric model to estimate issuance costs managers face to test the prediction and motivation of the pecking order. The estimates challenge the existence of a pecking order. First, debt costs increase from about 50% ...

Monetary and fiscal policy interactions are studied in a stochastic maximizing model. Policy is ‘active’ or ‘passive’ depending on its responsiveness to government debt shocks. Schemes for financing deficits and, therefore, the existence and uniqueness of equilibria depend on two policy parameters. The model is used to: (i) characterize the equilibria implied by various financing schemes, (ii) ...