This paper investigates how financial-sector leverage affects macroeconomic instability and welfare. In the model, banks borrow (use leverage) to allocate resources to productive projects and provide liquidity. When banks do not actively issue new equity, aggregate outcomes depend on the level of equity in the financial sector. Equilibrium is inefficient because agents do not internalize how th...

A firm’s current leverage ratio is one of the core characteristics of credit quality used in statistical default prediction models. Based on the capital structure literature, which shows that leverage is mean-reverting to a target leverage, we forecast future leverage ratios and include them in the set of default risk drivers. The analysis is done with a discrete duration model. Out-of-sample a...

T paper proposes a new methodology to infer investors’ expectations about the speed of leverage adjustment implicit in the prices of credit instruments. On average, the credit markets imply a fairly rapid annual speed of adjustment of 26% toward a firm’s predicted leverage. The speed varies considerably across partitions formed by the differential implications of the pecking order, market timin...

Leverage and securitization are at the core of the shadow banking system. We provide a non-technical review of the theory of leverage developed in collateral general equilibrium models with incomplete markets. We explain how leverage can be endogenously determined in equilibrium, and its relation with tail risk, volatility and asset prices. We provide a description of the Leverage Cycle and how...

this paper explores the leverage determinants across firms’ sizesbased on the two main theories behind the capital structure, the trade-offand the pecking order theories. a panel data is sued to find therelationship between capital structure and the variables that proxy forbenefits and costs of debt during 1990 to 2006. our findings show thatboth principles help to explain the capital structure...

We empirically examine whether firms increase financial leverage following mergers. Firms could increase financial leverage either because of an increase in debt capacity or because of unused debt capacity from pre-merger years. We find that financial leverage of combined firms increases significantly following mergers. A cross-sectional analysis shows that the change in financial leverage arou...

This paper studies the capital structure dynamics of central and eastern European firms to better understand the quantitative and qualitative development of financial systems in this region. The dynamic model used endogenises the target leverage as well as the adjustment speed towards these targets. It is applied to microeconomic data for 10 countries. We find that during the transition process...