Capital Structure Dynamics And Stock Returns

Many finance theories predict that the capital structure affects firm value, which implies that the changes in leverage have an impact on stock returns. Most of the existing literature however has been focusing on the determinants of the capital structure. Using a sample of U.S. public firms during 1975-2002, we document a significantly negative effect of leverage changes on next-quarter stock returns. This effect remains significant after controlling for other firm characteristics such as ROE, book-to-market, firm size, and past returns. We propose and test several hypotheses to explain the observed effect. We find that the negative effect is stronger for the firms with a higher leverage level. This is consistent with a dynamic view of the pecking-order model that an increase in leverage reduces firms' debt capacity and may lead to future underinvestment. Further tests confirm the negative effect of current leverage change on future investment. In contrast, our results cannot be explained by the trade-off theory, default premium, the market timing theory, or the operational signaling story. Specifically, we find that deviation from the target leverage ratio has no impact on the stock returns, inconsistent with the trade-off theory (which implies an optimal, or partially optimal, leverage ratio). In addition, the change of long-term debt affects stock returns more than the change of short-term debt, and the one-year expected return following leverage change does not increase, both of which are inconsistent with the default risk premium hypothesis. Our results are not driven by firms' market timing activities. A firm times the market by issuing new equity (repurchasing stocks) when its equity is over- (under-) valued, which implies a positive relation between the leverage change and stock return. We also do not find support for the view that leverage increase signals poor future operating performance. Finally, we show that the return effect of leverage change contains information that cannot be explained by the popular pricing factors. This sheds new light on the link between capital structure choice and empirical asset pricing.

U.S. corporations do not use their debt and equity issuing and repurchasing activities to counteract the mechanistic effects of stock returns on their debt equity ratios. Thus, over 1-5 year horizons, stock returns can explain about 40% of debt ratio dynamics. Although corporate (net) issuing activity is lively, and although it can explain the remaining 60% of debt ratio dynamics (long-term debt issuing activity being most capital structure relevant), corporate issuing motives remain largely a mystery. When stock returns are accounted for, taxes, bankruptcy costs, and many other proxies used in the literature, play at best a very modest role in explaining capital structure.

"Using a comprehensive database of firms in Western and Eastern Europe, we study how the business environment in a country drives the creation of new firms. Our focus is on regulations governing entry. We find entry regulations hamper entry, especially in industries that naturally should have high entry. Also, value added per employee in naturally "high entry" industries grows more slowly in countries with onerous regulations on entry. Interestingly, regulatory entry barriers have no adverse effect on entry in corrupt countries, only in less corrupt ones. Taken together, the evidence suggests bureaucratic entry regulations are neither benign nor welfare improving. However, not all regulations inhibit entry. In particular, regulations that enhance the enforcement of intellectual property rights or those that lead to a better developed financial sector do lead to greater entry in industries that do more R & D or industries that need more external finance"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

Capital structure theory is one of the most dynamic areas of finance and forms the basis for modern thinking on the capital structure of firms. Much controversy has resulted from comparisons of the theory of capital structure originally developed by Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller to real-world situations. Two competing theories have emerged over the years, the optimal capital structure theory and the pecking order theory.Arvin Ghosh begins with an overview of the controversies regarding capital structure theories, and then statistically tests both the optimal capital structure and pecking order theories. Using the binomial approach he analyzes the determinants of capital structure while discussing the role of market power in determining capital structure decisions. Ghosh probes the questions of new stock offerings and stockholders' returns, and analyzes capital structure and executive compensation. He then looks into debt financing ownership structure, and the controversal relationship between capital structure and firm profitability. Finally, he discusses the latest developments in the field of capital structure.A concise overview of a major issue in business economics and finance, this volume provides a fuller understanding of capital structure influence on the financial performance of firms, and will certainly stimulate further debate. While hundreds of scholarly articles have been written on the subject this is the first book to test competing theories against measurements of firms' performance and their underlying capital structure.

Using a panel of 425 European firms over the period from 1990 to 2005, we revisit Welch's (2004) finding that stock returns are the primary determinant of capital structure changes and that the corporate motives for issuing activities remain largely unexplained. We document that about half of the variation in leverage can be explained by stock return-induced effects over both 1-year and 5-year horizons. In contrast to the US evidence, corporate issuing activities are not as pronounced in our European sample, but they seem nevertheless sufficient for firms to maintain a target debt ratio in the long run. Therefore, our results are also consistent with recent evidence for dynamic rebalancing of the capital structure within a target range in the presence of adjustment costs. In a horse race with stock returns, traditional capital structure variables are inferior in explaining corporate leverage ratios and readjustment in response to return-induced changes in the short run, but they retain a significant role in the long run.

My dissertation studies several topics related to the anomalous behavior of stock returns in the time series and cross section. It includes three parts. The first part investigates the relation between leverage and stock returns. First, we provide the first empirical evidence that this relation is masked by maturity: stocks with higher short-maturity debt earn significantly higher returns, but stocks with higher long-maturity debt earn lower returns. The opposite directions separated by maturity help explain why the relation between leverage and returns has been mixed. We further show that the positive short-maturity return spread is significant, persistent, and not explained by well-known risk factors (such as size or book to market). Second, we also provide the first theoretical model to explain the relation between maturity-related leverage and stock returns by endogenizing debt maturity; Firms optimally choose the maturity of their debt by trading off the cost of long term maturity with its financial risk on equity. Firms with lower credit quality find it more expensive to borrow long term, so they optimally have debt with shorter maturity. In equilibrium, firms with higher short-term debt or lower long-term debt are riskier firms and earn higher expected returns. We show that the empirical evidence we uncover can be consistent with theoretical predictions. In the second part; my co-authors, Long Chen, Ohad Kadan and I demonstrate an inconsistency of the momentum and reversal effects in explaining stock return dynamics. We argue that a two-way sorting based on long-term and recent performance can accommodate the two effects by distinguishing between fresh and stale winners and losers. Building on this idea, we propose a 'fresh momentum' strategy which invests in fresh winners and fresh losers only. This strategy generates a fresh momentum profit of 5.1\% per year even after controlling for the Carhart four-factor model (including momentum). To explain the phenomenon, we argue that investors mistakenly respond to shocks to firm fundamentals as if they are going to continue in the long run, and these mistakes are exacerbated for fresh momentum stocks, presumably generating the abnormally large returns over the short run. This hypothesis is strongly supported by evidence from earnings shocks, analyst forecast revisions, and post-earnings announcement returns. In the third part, my co-author, Long Chen and I provide one of the first papers to document extensive stock return anomalies at the industry level. We find smaller industries, industries with lower investment and industries with lower inventory changes have bigger average industry returns. Value industries have lower industry returns in contrast to higher average returns of value firms. These anomalies are robust to even controlling for known (firm-level sorted) risk factors. We further explore the relation between these anomalies and business cycles. We find consistent business cycle dynamics with the return spreads associated with these anomalies.

Empirical Capital Structure reviews the empirical capital structure literature from both the cross-sectional determinants of capital structure as well as time-series changes.

“Far can be” by Angel Mary Anoop describes her thoughts about the world, life and it's possibilities. This book illustrates the speakers view on nature, people, beauty, and dreams through poems . The writers perspective on following dreams to achieve success, reminds the responsibility on nature, accept the people in the way they are, and finally a humorous outlook on the pandemic. It is clear that the readers gets astonished from this poetry by knowing the authors age.

We study an environment with short sale constraints and heterogeneous beliefs among outsiders and between insiders and outsiders. Firm insiders choose between equity, debt, and convertible debt to raise external financing. We analyze two settings: one where heterogeneous beliefs is the only market imperfection and another where there are significant security issue and financial distress costs. Our model generates a pecking order of external financing different from asymmetric information models, and new predictions for capital structure, sequential tranching of securities, the price impact of security issues, and long-run stock returns. It also provides a new rationale for convertible debt issuance.

The research reported in this volume represents the second stage of a wide-ranging National Bureau of Economic Research effort to investigate "The Changing Role of Debt and Equity in Financing U.S. Capital Formation." The first group of studies sponsored under this project, which have been published individually and summarized in a 1982 volume bearing the same title (Friedman 1982), addressed several key issues relevant to corporate sector behavior along with such other aspects of the evolving financial underpinnings of U.S. capital formation as household saving incentives, international capital flows, and government debt management. In the project's second series of studies, presented at the National Bureau of Economic Research conference in January 1983 and published here for the first time along with commentaries from that conference, the central focus is the financial side of capital formation undertaken by the U.S. corporate business sector. At the same time, because corporations' securities must be held, a parallel focus is on the behavior of the markets that price these claims.