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Capital Structure Dynamics And Stock Returns, Jie Cai, Zhe Zhang
Capital Structure Dynamics And Stock Returns, Jie Cai, Zhe Zhang
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
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 …