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Back to the Beginning: Persistence and the Cross‐Section of Corporate Capital Structure

Open access
LEMMON, MICHAEL L., ROBERTS, MICHAEL R., ZENDER, JAIME F.·2008·The Journal of Finance

Abstract

We find that the majority of variation in leverage ratios is driven by an unobserved time‐invariant effect that generates surprisingly stable capital structures: High (low) levered firms tend to remain as such for over two decades. This feature of leverage is largely unexplained by previously identified determinants, is robust to firm exit, and is present prior to the IPO, suggesting that variation in capital structures is primarily determined by factors that remain stable for long periods of time. We then show that these results have important implications for empirical analysis attempting to understand capital structure heterogeneity.

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Crossref · 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2008.01369.x

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Metadata

Authors
LEMMON, M. L., ROBERTS, M. R., & ZENDER, J. F.
Venue
The Journal of Finance
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2008-07-19
Volume
63
Issue
4
Pages
1575-1608
ISSN
  • 0022-1082 (ISSN-L)
  • 1540-6261
OpenAlex
W3121819860
Cited by
1,844
References
8
FWCI
296.17
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Back to the Beginning: Persistence and the Cross‐Section of Corporate Capital Structure. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2008.01369.x
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LEMMON, M. L., ROBERTS, M. R., & ZENDER, J. F. (2008). Back to the Beginning: Persistence and the Cross‐Section of Corporate Capital Structure. The Journal of Finance. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2008.01369.x

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.