Capital structure adjustments: Do macroeconomic and business risks matter? (original) (raw)
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We employ dynamic threshold partial adjustment models to study the asymmetries in firms' adjustments toward their target leverage. Using a sample of US firms over the period 2002-2012, we document a negative impact of the Global Financial Crisis on the speed of leverage adjustment. In our subperiod analysis, we find moderate evidence of cross-sectional heterogeneity in this speed, which seems more pronounced pre-crisis and provides little support for the financial constraint view. Over the pre-crisis period, more constrained firms, such as those with high growth, with large investment, of small size, and with volatile earnings, adjust their capital structures more quickly than their less constrained counterparts. These firms rely heavily on external funds to offset large financing deficits, suggesting that their higher adjustment speeds may be driven by lower adjustment costs that are shared with the transaction costs of accessing external capital markets.
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Journal of Financial Economics, 2006
The empirical literature provides conflicting assessments about how firms choose their capital structures. Distinguishing among the three main hypotheses (''tradeoff'', pecking order, and market timing) requires that we know whether firms have long-run leverage targets and (if so) how quickly they adjust toward them. Yet many previous researchers have applied empirical specifications that fail to recognize the potential for incomplete adjustment. A more general, partial-adjustment model of firm leverage indicates that firms do have target capital structures. The typical firm closes about one-third of the gap between its actual and its target debt ratios each year.
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This paper examines time-series patterns of external financing decisions and shows that publicly traded U.S. firms fund a much larger proportion of their financing deficit with external equity when the cost of equity capital is low. The historical values of the cost of equity capital have long-lasting effects on firms' capital structures through their influence on firms' historical financing decisions. We also introduce a new econometric technique to deal with biases in estimates of the speed of adjustment towards target leverage. We find that firms adjust toward target leverage at a moderate speed, with a half-life of 3.7 years for book leverage, even after controlling for the traditional determinants of capital structure and firm fixed effects. * dividend-paying firms ** firms that don't pay dividends
Emerging Markets Economics: Firm Behavior & Microeconomic Issues eJournal, 2020
This article aims at defining the main gaps and presenting the results of literature about the determinants of capital structure, capital structure dynamics and the determinants of the speed of adjustment towards target leverage. Beside the effects of firm-specific determinants, the article covers the major macro-economic events affecting capital structure decisions like the global financial crisis as well as political uncertainty. The article also shed the light on the differences between banks and non-financial institutions in terms of rules and regulations that shape the dynamic behavior of utilizing the different sources of finance. As a conceptual article, the author employed a reflective stance by counting solely on secondary literature. According to Dzansi and Hoeyi (2013), this stance is consistent with interpretivist reasoning in the social sciences. Analysis of empirical studies revealed that the capital structure decision is influenced by profitability, size of the firm, ...
Incorporating active adjustment into a financing based model of capital structure
The conventional partial adjustment model, which focuses on leverage evolution, has difficulty identifying deliberate capital structure adjustments as it confounds financing decisions with the mechanical autocorrelation of leverage. We propose and estimate a financing-based partial adjustment model that separates the effects of financing decisions on leverage evolution from mechanical evolution. The speed of adjustment (SOA) is firm-specific and stochastic, and active targeting of capital structure has a multiplier effect that depends on the size of financial deficit. Overall, we find expected SOA from active rebalanc-ing (30%) more than doubles what is expected from mechanical mean reversion alone (13%).
his paper investigates the dynamics of capital structure adjustment speeds for financially constrained, unconstrained and full sample JSE listed non-financial firms across the business cycle. Using the generalised method of moments (GMM) estimation technique, and controlling for the effects of mean reversion and extreme leverage observations, we find some evidence of moderate target adjustment behaviour for total and long term leverage in both the good and bad macroeconomic states. However adjustment speeds are higher for the short term debt ratio. Furthermore, the manner in which adjustment speeds change is highly sensitive to the definition of macroeconomic states used. We also find evidence that there is a statistically significant difference in the speed of adjustment for firms across the different macroeconomic states. However, this significance dissipates when the short term debt ratio is used. It is also documented that the difference in the speed of adjustment for the constr...
Firms' dynamic adjustment to target capital structures in transition economies
2006
We study the capital structure dynamics of Central and Eastern European firms in order to get a better understanding of the quantitative and qualitative development of the financial systems in this region. The dynamic model we use endogenizes the target leverage as well as the adjustment speed and is applied to microeconomic data for ten countries. We find that during the transition process firms generally increased their leverage, lowering the gap between actual and target leverage. Profitability and age are the most robust determinants of capital structure targets. Older firms attract more bank debt, whereas profitability decreases firms' leverage targets. While banking system development has in general enabled firms to get closer to their leverage targets, information asymmetries between firms and banks are still important. As a result, firms prefer internal finance to bank debt (pecking order behaviour) and adjust leverage only slowly.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018
The major perspective of this paper is to provide more evidence regarding how "quickly", in different macroeconomic states, companies adjust their capital structure to their leverage targets. This study extends the empirical research on the topic of capital structure by focusing on a quantile regression method to investigate the behavior of firm-specific characteristics and macroeconomic factors across all quantiles of distribution of leverage (book leverage and market leverage). Therefore, depending on a partial adjustment model, we find that the adjustment speed fluctuated in different stages of book versus market leverage. Furthermore, while macroeconomic states change, we detect clear differentiations of the contribution and the effects of the firm-specific and the macroeconomic variables between market leverage and book leverage debt ratios. Consequently, we deduce that across different macroeconomic states the nature and maturity of borrowing influence the persistence and endurance of the relation between determinants and borrowing.
arXiv (Cornell University), 2018
The major perspective of this paper is to provide more evidence regarding how "quickly", in different macroeconomic states, companies adjust their capital structure to their leverage targets. This study extends the empirical research on the topic of capital structure by focusing on a quantile regression method to investigate the behavior of firm-specific characteristics and macroeconomic factors across all quantiles of distribution of leverage (book leverage and market leverage). Therefore, depending on a partial adjustment model, we find that the adjustment speed fluctuated in different stages of book versus market leverage. Furthermore, while macroeconomic states change, we detect clear differentiations of the contribution and the effects of the firm-specific and the macroeconomic variables between market leverage and book leverage debt ratios. Consequently, we deduce that across different macroeconomic states the nature and maturity of borrowing influence the persistence and endurance of the relation between determinants and borrowing.