Essays on Capital Structure and Firm Investment

In this thesis, I study the interactions between firms' capital structure and real decisions. First, I investigate how a firm's financial leverage will impact its investment contingent on whether future growth opportunities are anticipated. Second, I test the under and over investment hypothesis related to debt financing contingent on whether the firm is likely to under or over invest. Last, I investigate how a firm's production technology can impact its production and capital structure decisions. In Chapter 1, I investigate the impact of anticipations of future growth opportunities on leverage-investment interactions. I show that when growth opportunities are unanticipated, the negative impact of leverage on investment is up to two times larger than when they are anticipated. The presence of institutional stockholdings significantly reduces the under investment problem. An instrumental variable analysis reveals that the leverage-investment relationship is weak when the problem of endogeneity is controlled. The results provide strong evidence that Canadian firms take ex ante leverage adjustments to mitigate the debt overhang problem. Chapter 2 studies the extent to which leverage-investment interactions depend on the level of initial investment as well future investment opportunities in US firms. I find a strong negative relationship between leverage and investment for firms with low levels of (initial) investment and high investment opportunities. I also find a positive relationship between leverage and investment for firms with high levels of (initial) investment and low growth opportunities. I distinguish between Tobin's Average Q and Marginal Q as proxies for firms' investment opportunities and propose a novel method to estimate Marginal Q. Chapter 3 is a joint work with Varouj Aivazian. In this chapter, we investigate the interactions between the flexibility of a firm's production and its financial structure. This chapter shows that production flexibility is an important factor explaining the cross sectional variations in financial leverage among U.S. firms. Alternative empirical measures of production flexibility are all shown to be positively associated with financial leverage. This chapter also develops a novel measure of inter-temporal production flexibility and identifies important linkages between production and financing decisions.Ph.D