The Cost of Debt
Journal of Finance, Forthcoming
WFA 2007 Big Sky, MT Meetings Paper
65 Pages Posted: 8 Mar 2007 Last revised: 15 Sep 2013
There are 2 versions of this paper
The Cost of Debt
The Cost of Debt
Date Written: May 11, 2010
Abstract
We estimate firm-specific marginal cost of debt functions for a large panel of companies between 1980 and 2007. The marginal cost curves are identified by exogenous variation in the marginal tax benefits of debt. The location of a given company’s cost of debt function varies with characteristics such as asset collateral, size, book-to-market, asset tangibility, cash flows, and whether the firm pays dividends. By integrating the area between benefit and cost functions we estimate that the equilibrium net benefit of debt is 3.5% of asset value, resulting from an estimated gross benefit of debt of 10.4% of asset value and an estimated cost of debt of 6.9%. We find that the cost of being overlevered is asymmetrically higher than the cost of being underlevered and that expected default costs constitute approximately half of the total ex ante cost of debt.
Keywords: capital structure, cost of debt
JEL Classification: G30, G32
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
What Do We Know About Capital Structure? Some Evidence from International Data
By Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales
-
The Theory and Practice of Corporate Finance: Evidence from the Field
By John R. Graham and Campbell R. Harvey
-
The Theory and Practice of Corporate Finance: The Data
By John R. Graham and Campbell R. Harvey
-
Market Timing and Capital Structure
By Malcolm P. Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
-
Market Timing and Capital Structure
By Malcolm P. Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
-
Testing Tradeoff and Pecking Order Predictions About Dividends and Debt
By Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French
-
Testing Static Trade-Off Against Pecking Order Models of Capital Structure
-
Optimal Capital Structure Under Corporate and Personal Taxation
By Harry Deangelo and Ronald W. Masulis