The leverage-profitability puzzle resurrected
Journal article, Peer reviewed
Accepted version
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/2976239Utgivelsesdato
2020Metadata
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- Scientific articles [2189]
Originalversjon
Review of Finance, 2020, Volume 25, Issue 4, July 2021, Pages 1089–1128 10.1093/rof/rfaa032Sammendrag
With zero capital structure rebalancing costs, dynamic trade-off theory predicts that firms stay at their leverage targets with more profitable firms staying at higher leverage. This prediction is rejected by the robustly negative correlation between leverage and profitability. When rebalancing costs are added to this theory, it predicts a positive leverage–profitability correlation only in periods where companies pay these costs and actively rebalance their capital structures. However, we show that the correlation is negative when firms issue debt and distribute the proceeds to shareholders—precisely the case where the theory predicts it should be positive. Our results thus resurrect the leverage–profitability puzzle.