Capital Structure Rebalancing: Industry Leverage and Financial Slack

We assume a model in which a firm's indebtedness is strongly influenced by a fund's supply side because creditors and investors (users of CAPM and market multiples) assess their exposure and risk level at relative bases (similar companies). This behavior induces firms' capital structure targets towards the industry debt median, so managers can just manage capital structure around this value (financial slack). We investigated the role of financial slack, assessed as a measure of relative indebtedness, and industry debt in capital structure rebalancing. We used an initial sample of 32,309 US firm-year observations to estimate the industry median of 64 industries and a subsample of 5,380 observations in 58 industries used to construct a balanced panel for a period of 20 years. The results of the dynamic panel for book leverage indicate that a company's indebtedness tends to follow industry indebtedness, but tends to reverse its trend in a period of two years. Reversion rate is associated with financial slack, i.e., companies farthest from the median debt in an industry converge faster.我们假设如下模型：企业的负债水平受资金供给方的影响显著，因为债权人和投资者（资本资产定价模型（Capital Asset Pricing Model）与市场倍数（market multiples）使用者）会基于相对基准（即同类可比公司）评估自身的风险敞口与风险等级。该行为会促使企业将资本结构目标设定在行业债务中位数水平，因此管理层仅需围绕该数值调整资本结构（即财务松弛（financial slack））。本研究探讨了作为相对负债水平衡量指标的财务松弛（financial slack）以及行业债务在资本结构再平衡中的作用。我们使用包含32309条美国企业年度观测值的初始样本，对64个行业的债务中位数进行估算；同时选取58个行业下的5380条观测值作为子样本，构建时长为20年的平衡面板数据。账面杠杆（book leverage）动态面板的回归结果显示，企业的负债水平往往追随行业负债水平，但会在两年内出现趋势反转。收敛速率与财务松弛（financial slack）相关，即行业内偏离债务中位数越远的企业，其负债水平的收敛速度越快。