The Relative Leverage Premium

Filippo Ippolito (), Roberto Steri and Claudio Tebaldi ()

No 398, Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University

Abstract: The existing empirical evidence does not yet provide a clear understanding of how leverage and expected equity returns are related. While some studies show a positive relationship between financial leverage and returns, others conclude that returns are either insensitive or decrease with leverage, after controlling for size and book-to-market. We re-examine this evidence by explicitly accounting for the dynamic nature of a firm’s optimal leverage policy in the presence of frictions. Specifically, consistent with recent dynamic models of capital structure, we allow firms to temporarily deviate from their optimal capital structure due to adjustment costs. For each firm we estimate target leverage, and compute relative leverage as the difference between observed and target leverage. We find that relative leverage is positively and significantly related to expected equity returns, and has a dominant effect over size and book-to-market. The relative leverage premium shows a remarkable symmetry for over- and under-leveraged firms. Finally, the relative leverage premium is not captured by Fama and French’s three-factor model, and it appears to be consistent with rational asset pricing. We conjecture that risk-averse investors require a higher expected return for over-leveraged stocks than for under-leveraged ones because the former are counter-cyclical, while the latter are cyclical.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.unibocconi.it/igier/igi/wp/2011/398.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:igi:igierp:398

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://repec.unibocconi.it/igier/igi/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University via Rontgen, 1 - 20136 Milano (Italy).
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().