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Throughout the 21st century, US households have experienced unprecedented levels of leverage. This dynamic has been exacerbated by income shortfalls during the COVID-19 crisis. Leveraging and deleveraging decisions affect household consumption. This study investigates the effect of the dynamics of household leverage and consumption on the stock market.

The authors explore the relation between household leverage and consumption in the context of the consumption capital asset pricing model (CCAPM). The authors test the model's implication that leverage has a negative risk premium by transforming the asset pricing restriction into an unconditional linear factor model and estimate the model using the general method of moments procedure. The authors run time-series regressions to estimate individual stocks' exposures to leverage, and cross-sectional regressions to investigate the leverage risk premium.

The authors show that shocks to household debt have strong and lasting effects on consumption growth. The authors extend the CCAPM to accommodate this effect and find, using various test assets, a negative risk premium associated with household deleveraging. Looking at individual stocks the authors show that the deleveraging risk premium is not explained by well-known risk factors.

This paper contributes to the literature on the role of leverage in economics and finance by establishing a relation between household leverage and spending decisions. The authors provide novel evidence that households' leveraging and deleveraging decisions can be a fundamental and influential force in determining asset prices. Further, this paper argues that household leverage might explain the small, persistent, and predictable component in consumption growth hypothesised in the long-run risk asset pricing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how several key risk factors, including capital-to-asset ratio (CAR), franchise value and lobbying, affect various measures of risk in the US banking industry before, during and after the financial crisis. The empirical analysis covers the period 2004-2013.

Using recent bank holding company data, this research explores several factors driving risk in the US banking industry. The authors follow recent regulatory models and use a cross-sectional approach that can be employed as a complement to established regulatory bank failure and early warning models to detect and prevent bank crisis and to guide policy intervention over time.

The findings provide evidence that the CAR has a negative relationship with bank risk. The authors also show that banks’ franchise values exhibit a positive relationship with bank risk in non-crisis years and a negative relationship during the crisis. The authors further find evidence suggesting that lobbying decreases bank risk in non-crisis years and increases risk during the crisis.

Previous studies have controversially discussed the effect of factors driving bank risk. The authors contribute to the discussion and provide the first empirical study to analyze the effects of lobbying activities by bank holding companies on bank risk before, during and after the financial crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of operating leverage, and the subsequent abandonment option available to managers, on the relationship between corporate earnings and optimal financial leverage, thereby providing an alternative (rational) explanation for the observed negative relationship between these two quantities.

Working in a dynamic capital structure setting, where corporate earnings are modelled as an exogenous stochastic process, the paper explicitly adds fixed operating costs to the firm's value optimisation. This introduces a degree of operating leverage (DOL) and a non-zero value to the implicit abandonment option of the firm's manager. Solving for the firm's optimal timing and financing decisions the paper is able to derive the relationship between current corporate earnings and optimal financial leverage for a large class of earnings uncertainty assumptions. The theoretical implications are then tested empirically using a large selection of S&P 500 firms.

The analysis reveals that the manager's flexibility to abandon the project introduces nonlinearities into the valuation that are sufficient to reconcile the trade-off theory with the empirically observed negative earnings/financial leverage relationship. The paper further finds theoretical and empirical evidence of a positive relationship between operating and financial leverage.

Previous studies have used mean-reverting earnings as an explanation for the observed negative earnings/financial leverage relationship in a trade-off theory setting. The paper shows that the relationship does not need to be process specific. Instead, it is a direct result of the financial flexibility of managers.