Financial leverage and stock return comovement

Hung X. Do, Nhut H. Nguyen and Quan M.P. Nguyen

Journal of Financial Markets, 2022, vol. 60, issue C

Abstract: Leverage-initiating stocks experience an increase in return comovement with leveraged stocks and a decrease in return comovement with zero-leverage stocks in the year after the leverage initiation event. Conversely, stocks that fully deleverage comove more with their new peers of zero-leverage stocks and less with their old peers of leveraged stocks. These findings are robust after controlling for common factors and firm characteristics and using various time series and events as exogenous shocks to corporate leverage decisions. Our findings can be explained by investor clienteles for financial leverage and are not driven by omitted variables and other characteristic-induced comovements.

Keywords: Leverage; Comovement; Clientele (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G10 G14 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1386418121000720
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:finmar:v:60:y:2022:i:c:s1386418121000720

DOI: 10.1016/j.finmar.2021.100699

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Financial Markets is currently edited by B. Lehmann, D. Seppi and A. Subrahmanyam

More articles in Journal of Financial Markets from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().