I test the market discipline of bank risk hypothesis by examining whether banks choose risk management policies that account for the risk preferences of subordinated debt holders. Using around 500,000 quarterly observations on the population of U.S. insured commercial banks over the 1995–2009 period, I document that the ratio of subordinated debt affects bank risk management decisions consisten...

This study examines whether the Taiwan’s public debt is sustainable utilizing an unrestricted two-regime threshold autoregressive (TAR) model with an autoregressive unit root. The empirical results show that Taiwan’s public debt appears as a nonlinear series and is stationary in regime 1 but not in regime 2. This result implies that while Taiwan’s public debt was mostly sustainable over the 199...

This paper analyzes the debt ratio and the scale of cash dividend among the internationalized and domestic electronic industries in the US from 1999 to 2008 as the reference for financing strategies and decision. The evidence shows that the debt ratio and the payout cash dividend ratio in the internationalized electronic firms are lower than those in domestic electronic firms. Due to the unique...

This study examines the impact of capital structure on agency costs in 211 non-financial Chinese listed firms for the period 1999-2001. There are two main findings. (1) Firms with high debt to asset ratio have high ratio of annual sales to total assets and high ratio of return-on-equity. If a firm has a high debt to asset ratio, creditors are much more concerned about the payment of interest an...

How do governments react to the accumulation of debt? Do they take corrective measures or do let the debt grow? Whereas standard time series test cannot reject a unit root in the U.S. debt-GDP ratio, this paper provides evidence of corrective action: The U.S. primary surplus is an increasing function of the debt-GDP ratio. The debt-GDP ratio displays mean-reversion if one controls for war-time ...

n Robert M. Hull is an Associate Professor of Finance at Washburn University. In this paper, I extend the stock-for-debt research by investigating whether stock value is influenced by how a firm changes its leverage ratio in relationship to its industry leverage ratio norm. I find that announcement-period stock returns for firms moving “away from” industry debt-to-equity norms are significantly...

We examine the determinants of aggregate corporate capital structure using a novel dataset of accounting and market information that spans most publicly traded firms over the last century. We show that the stability of nonfinancial aggregate leverage over this period reflects two opposing forces. First, regulated sectors, such as railroads, delevered and contracted in size. Second, unregulated ...

Testing the reaction of the primary surplus to variations in public debt, relative to GDP respectively, has been frequently resorted to in order to test for sustainability of a given debt policy. In this contribution, we analyze theoretically under which condition a positive reaction of the primary surplus to variations in debt implies a sustainable debt policy. We demonstrate that the evolutio...

This paper shows that the debt burden of households, as measured by the debt service to income ratio, is helpful in forecasting the future growth of consumption expenditures. Using data for the United States over the period 1960-97, I find a significant negative relationship between the debt-service ratio of households and future aggregate spending growth. This effect is statistically important...