Debt Financing and Financial Flexibility Evidence from Proactive Leverage Increases
研究发现，企业主动增加杠杆主要是为了满足经营需求，而非进行大额股权支付；后续杠杆变化主要取决于财务盈余，而非主动向目标调整，支持财务灵活性在资本结构决策中的重要作用。
Firms that intentionally increase leverage through substantial debt issuances do so primarily as a response to operating needs rather than a desire to make a large equity payout. Subsequent debt reductions are neither rapid, nor the result of proactive attempts to rebalance the firm’s capital structure toward a long-run target. Instead, the evolution of the firm’s leverage ratio depends primarily on whether or not the firm produces a financial surplus. In fact, firms that generate subsequent deficits tend to cover these deficits predominantly with more debt even though they exhibit leverage ratios that are well above estimated target levels. Our findings are broadly consistent with a capital structure theory in which financial flexibility, in the form of unused debt capacity, plays an important role in capital structure choices. The search for an empirically viable capital structure theory has confounded financial economists for decades. Standard trade-off models of capital structure have been criticized on the grounds that they do a poor job of explaining observed debt ratios. For example, traditional trade-off models have difficulty explaining why firms tend to issue stock after exogenous decreases in leverage