The combination of rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities can create unintentional synchronization of homeowner leverage, leading to a ‘‘ratchet’’ effect on leverage because homes are indivisible and owner-occupants cannot raise equity to reduce leverage when home prices fall. Our simulation of the U.S. housing market yields potential losse...

We show that cross-border financial flows arise when countries differ in their abilities to use assets as collateral. Financial integration is a way of sharing scarce collateral. The ability of one country to leverage and tranche assets provides attractive financial contracts to investors in the other country, and general equilibrium effects on prices create opportunities for investors in the f...

This study examines the impact of financial leverage on the firms’ investment decisions using information on Canadian publicly traded companies. It shows that leverage is negatively related to investment and that this negative effect is significantly stronger for firms with low growth opportunities than those with high growth opportunities. The paper tests the robustness of these results using ...

We introduce a new mechanism for leverage dynamics, which results from a multiperiod game of lenders with differentiated beliefs about the firm's fundamental returns. The game features strategic substitutability for low existing leverage and one-sided strategic complementarity for high existing leverage. The resulting leverage process exhibits a mean-reverting regime around a long-run level, as...

This paper analyzes the interaction between financial leverage and takeover activity. We develop a dynamic model of takeovers in which the financing strategies of bidding firms and the timing and terms of takeovers are jointly determined. In the paper, capital structure plays the role of a commitment device, and determines the outcome of the acquisition contest. We demonstrate that there exists...

This paper develops a real options model of imperfect competition with asymmetric information that analyzes firms’ exit decisions. Optimal exit decision is linked to firm characteristics such as financial leverage and efficiency. The model shows that informational asymmetries between product market rivals can lead more efficient and less leveraged firms to leave the product market prematurely. ...