Capital Structure, Liquidity and Transferable Human Capital in Competitive Equilibrium

This paper analyzes how human capital and economic uncertainty affect capital structure and managerial compensation. We model a competitive industry where wealth constrained managers provide human capital that can be transferred across firms, and where equityholders give managers access to the physical assets of the firm. Equityholders and managers bargain for the firm’s stochastic free cash flows. We show that the level of net debt acts as a tool to attract and retain human capital. Negative net debt occurs in volatile and human capital intensive industries. Cash holdings (or unused lines of credit) in booms serve as a costly hedge against liquidity shocks in recession. The cost of holding cash is internalized by managers, unlike the cost associated with raising cash in recession through a dilutive equity issue. We obtain simple expressions for the equilibrium payout rate and the managerial compensation rate and we show how, in recessions, they are influenced by each party’s outside option.