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The authors examine the effect of greenhouse gas (ghg) assurance on cost of debt, and the effect of board gender diversity on cost of debt, for an international sample of listed companies.

Utilizing firm-level data and a quantile regression approach, this study examines the effects of greenhouse gas assurance and board diversity on cost of debt by employing an international sample of firms during 2015–2021.

The authors find that in firms with a relatively low cost of debt the external assurance of greenhouse gas emissions and gender diversity could significantly contribute to a reduction of cost of debt. Furthermore, other measures of board diversity that are linked with independent directors and skilled directors seem to contribute to an increase of firms' cost of debt in the lower end of distribution. Drawing from the agency theory, the authors showcase the fact that ghg assurance reduces information asymmetry and therefore agency costs such as borrowing costs and signals to the stakeholders a long-term commitment to excellence.

This study is the first that provides insights on the relationship between ghg assurance, board diversity and cost of debt.

This study is aimed at interrogating the mediation role of public spending in domestic debt and economic growth nexus, drawing on debt overhang theory and the Keynesian view.

The study deployed a time series data (from 1981 to 2020) set drawn from the 2021 Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletin. The mediation effect of public spending was tested by performing structural equation modeling after pre-estimation Augmented Dickey-Fuller unit root test.

Overall, the study outcomes indicate that domestic debt and public spending have significant positive effects on economic growth. Additionally, the study finds public spending to partially mediate domestic debt and economic growth nexus.

This study's outcomes provide insights that will enable fiscal policymakers to focus on internal borrowing, keep it under strict control to avert crowding out effects and improve public spending on productive projects to stimulate economic growth.

As the first study to question the mediation effect of public spending in domestic debt-economic growth relationship, it deepens and extends extant literature on domestic debt-economic growth nexus.

This study examines the effect of public debt on the economic growth of OECD countries by disentangling the effect into permanent and transitory components. The study covers 37 OECD countries.

The Mundlak decomposition was employed to decompose the effect of public debt into its transitory and permanent effect on economic growth. To account for potential endogeneity problem, the Hausman and Taylor estimator was employed to estimate the decomposed model. Further, the study disaggregated the OECD model into country group models for further analysis of the dynamics of the relationship between the variables.

The findings of the study reveal that in the full OECD model public debt exerts a significant negative permanent and positive transitory effect on economic growth. This was robust to alternative model specifications. The magnitude of the negative permanent effect of debt was found to be larger than the positive transitory effect. Further, the estimates of the disaggregated models reveal that though public debt has a negative permanent effect across all the country groups, it was not the case for the transitory effect of debt. Also, a net public debt model was estimated, and its effect on public debt was found to be largely insignificant, exhibiting a Ricardian-like behaviour.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study, particularly in the OECD context that employed the Mundlak transformation to examine the permanent versus transitory effect of public debt on economic growth.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the use of public debt and investment activity of European listed real estate companies.

Using a hand-collected sample of debt structures of 102 European public real estate companies, and using European Central Bank lending standards survey as a proxy for bank credit availability, the authors test a conditional hypothesis on the relationship between investment rates and the use of public debt during period of constrained bank lending environment in Europe.

The results show that ex ante diversification of debt allows retaining higher investment rates when the main source of debt, bank lending, is shrinking. The effect is statistically and economically significant and increases during times of tight bank lending constraints. The authors find no support to debt capacity explanation of the effect. They neither find support of the higher investment rates to be indicative of overinvestment problem. The results are robust to alternative model specifications and estimators.

The empirical analysis is limited to Europe.

Investments and the growth of real estate companies depend on their ability to seize value-increasing opportunities that arise in the competitive markets. This paper evaluates the role of a diversified debt structure in this context. The results suggest that debt structure can have material importance for the investment activity of European listed real estate companies and issuance of public debt can help companies to counterbalance the negative effects of restricted bank loan supply on the investment levels.

The paper extends the literature on debt structures of listed real estate firms by considering the effect of debt diversification on investments.

The purpose of this article is to examine how financial distress risk and currency crisis affect the relationship between financial leverage and financial performance.

This study uses data of 200 firms listed on Istanbul Stock Exchange during the period from 2009 to 2019, resulting in 1950 firm-year observations. Pooled ordinary least squares, random effects, firm fixed effects and two-step system GMM models are used to investigate the hypotheses of this study.

The results reveal that financial leverage has negative and significant effect on financial performance, and that this effect is stronger for firms with higher financial distress risk. Furthermore, the findings provide moderate evidence that currency crisis exacerbates the negative association between leverage and performance.

The results of this study have important implications for firms in emerging markets. Managers can enhance firm performance by reducing the level of financial leverage, especially in firms with higher financial distress risk. These firms incur higher debt costs, and then they can benefit more from the decreases in debt ratio in their capital structure. Moreover, the decreases in debt level have more importance in currency crisis times, when the access to external finance becomes more expensive and more difficult.

To the author's knowledge, this research is the first to examine the effect of currency crisis on the financial leverage–financial performance relationship and is one of few that investigate the role of financial distress risk in determining the linkage between leverage and firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the redistributive effect of domestic public debt: lenders to the government lie on the higher end of the income distribution, but the burden of debt financing falls on the entire tax base, to the extent that taxes are used to service debt. Because domestic debt is typically held by domestic lenders, this involves a redistribution of resources.

The author uses cross-country panel data on debt composition, and run regressions of income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, using various specifications, controlling for a variety of macroeconomic, fiscal and political variables.

The author finds that the composition of public debt is consistently a significant determinant of income inequality: the domestic share of public debt is regressive and significant across all specifications, even controlling for total and external debt servicing, political conflict, corruption and a variety of government spending variables.

The data span 18 years (1990-2007) which means that long-run effects are hard to track. While the author has a good mix in the sample of observations from low-, middle- and high-income countries, the author is constrained in the choice of countries by the availability of data on inequality and on the composition of public debt.

This is the first paper to examine the composition of public debt in terms of domestic and external debt, and any bearing it may have on income inequality. The finding is also new for both the public debt and income inequality literatures: cross-country panel data are consistent with the belief that domestic debt redistributes resources from the entire tax base to wealthy holders of government debt in a way that external debt does not.

This paper aims to investigate how the relation between stock returns of US firms and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil prices is affected by leverage from 1990 to 2020.

This paper examines how the relationship between stock returns of US firms and WTI oil prices is affected by leverage from 1990 to 2020 using a fixed-effect model estimation framework.

Results from the fixed-effect regression models suggest that leverage effects on stock returns are pervasive both in aggregate and cross-industry levels, while the mining industry is more sensitive. In addition to the positive oil price effects attenuated by leverage at the aggregate level, the authors observe stronger marginal effects of leverage only for the mining sector. Being more exposed to commodity prices, the positive effects of oil prices on stock returns in the mining sector are offset by large debt ratios. Asymmetries, effects of debt maturity structure and implications are also discussed.

This study is grounded on the contemporary cash flow claim of leverage NOT on the long-run effect of leverage considering cash flow constraints. The oil price increase is assumed to represent an advancement of the overall economy. This study does not capture the oil prices response to some other economic forces and vice-versa.

Mining companies should therefore reduce the stock of debt with respect to their assets to make possible the “pass-through” from oil prices to the stock market.

Previously undocumented and the authors show that leverage reduces the total effect of oil prices on stock returns, consistent with the hypothesis. Asymmetric and debt maturity structures effects are also discussed.

The rise in public debt and the increased extraction of natural resources in Ghana at a time that environmental degradation is escalating, especially with carbon dioxide emission, is worrying. This seems to cast doubt on the country's ability to meet the goals of the Paris agreement for climate change and ensuring sustainable development. Consequently, in this study, the effect of natural resources extraction and government debt on carbon dioxide emission is investigated.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis was adopted for this study. The Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square Model was used for assessing the data. An annual data from 1971 to 2018 was used for the analysis.

The long-run results based on the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square analysis reveal that natural resources extraction increases carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, the joint effect of post-oil production in commercial quantities and natural resources rent increases carbon dioxide emission. Further, the findings document that the initial stage of government debt improves environmental quality up to a point, beyond which an increase in debt hurts the environment. On the environmental degrading effect of economic growth, the findings validate the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis. It is also observed that urbanization degrades environmental quality.

The study offers appropriate recommendations policymakers need to embrace towards the attainment of lower carbon emissions from the loans and natural resources rent to achieve environmental sustainability.

The effect of debt on carbon dioxide emission is assessed for the Ghanaian economy. It also contributes to studies on the natural resources-carbon emission nexus.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of structural economic vulnerability of developing countries on their public indebtedness.

The authors perform the analysis by the use of fixed effects technique where the standard errors are corrected by the Driscoll-Kraay (1998) method. The panel covers 96 developing countries over the period 1980-2008.

The results suggest evidence of a “U-shaped” relationship between the structural vulnerability and the total public debt in developing countries. More particularly in low-income countries (LICs), the structural vulnerability appears to be a strong determinant of the build-up of the total public debt.

It would be interesting to extend the research to small Island developing states. Indeed, the authors do not include this group of countries because of lack of data, especially on the variable “quality of governance” for almost all countries of this group. Accordingly, the research should be extended to such countries as well as these data are available.

The implications of the study is that international institutions, including those of the Bretton Woods should take into account the structural vulnerability of developing countries when designing development policies, especially the ones related to debt sustainability in developing countries and particularly LICs.

The fact of the international institutions to take into account the structural vulnerability in the design of international development policy, especially those related to debt issues will have major implications on the macroeconomic policy design by these developing countries as well as on poverty reduction.

The added value of this paper is to use recent data on structural vulnerability to analyse the effect of the latter on public indebtdeness of developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate benefits to debt reduction by using the natural experiment provided by the debt relief programs: the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative launched by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in 1996 and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative extension in 2005.

The authors apply a time-shifted difference-in-differences strategy to evaluate the effects of this intervention. The date of each country’s decision to participate in the program is used as one treatment point while the date of the completion of the debt relief program is used as another treatment point. The exercise compares different economic outcomes such as domestic and foreign investment, schooling, and employment of the treated observations to the counterfactual of untreated country-years. The period between the decision and completion points is a short run while the period after the completion point is considered a long run.

The authors found that debt relief increased capital investment as much as 1.63 percent in the short run and 5.79 percent in the long run. However, there was no effect on foreign direct investment suggesting that debt overhang does not affect incentives of foreign investors. Output and schooling enrollment increased both in the short and long run.

This paper exploits a natural experiment of debt relief in a number of developing countries to shed light on the possible benefits to debt reduction. The authors are able to separate the short- and long-run effects of debt reduction. The finding that domestic but not foreign investment responds to debt reduction is suggestive of the differences in incentives across these two sources of investment.