Better measurement of the output produced and capital employed by firms substantially improves the ability to explain capital structure variation in the cross-section. For every firm, we construct the set of other firms producing the same output using the set of product market competitors listed in the firm’s public SEC filings. In addition, we improve measurement of capital structure by explicitly accounting for leased capital. These two steps increase the explanatory power of the average capital structure of other firms producing similar output on a firm’s capital structure by 50 to 75%, compared to the use of the average unadjusted debt ratio of other firms in the same 3-digit SIC code. We provide evidence that the large explanatory power of the capital structure of other firms producing similar output is related to the assets used in the production process. Our findings suggest that what a firm produces and the assets used in production are the most important determinants of capital structure in the cross-section.

During the last quarter of 2008, financial losses in state pension funds varied from 12% to 68% of the revenue generated by the state government. We quantify a sovereign default channel in the state municipal market by examining how changes in bond spreads vary with state pension fund losses, controlling for credit ratings and various measures of the state’s fiscal strength. Municipal bond spreads rose by 7-15 basis points for each 10% of state-generated revenue lost by states in the lower half of the credit quality spectrum.

We calculate the present value of state employee pension liabilities as of June 2009 using discount rates that reflect the risk of the payments from a taxpayer perspective. If benefits have the same default and recovery characteristics as state general obligation debt, the national total of promised liabilities based on current salary and service is $3.20 trillion. If pensions have higher priority than state debt, the present value of liabilities is much larger. Using zero-coupon Treasury yields, which are default-free but contain other priced risks, promised liabilities are $4.43 trillion. Liabilities are even larger under broader concepts that account for projected salary growth and future service.

We calculate the present value of state pension liabilities under existing policies and separately under policy changes that would affect pension payouts. If promised payments are viewed as default free, then it is appropriate to use discount rates given by the Treasury yield curve. If plans are frozen at June 2009 levels, then the present value of liabilities would be $4.4 trillion. Under the typical actuarial method of recognizing future service and wage increases, this figure rises to $5.2 trillion. Compared to $1.8 trillion in pension fund assets, the baseline level of unfunded liabilities is therefore around $3 trillion. A 1 percentage point reduction in cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) would lower total liabilities by 9–11%; implementing actuarially fair early retirement would reduce them by 2–5%; and increasing the retirement age by 1 year would reduce them by 2–4%. Dramatic policy changes, such as the elimination of COLAs or the implementation of Social Security retirement age parameters, would leave liabilities around $1.5 trillion more than plan assets. This suggests that taxpayers will bear the lion's share of the costs associated with the legacy liabilities of state DB pension plans.

Using a novel data set that records individual debt issues on the balance sheet of a large sample of rated public firms, we show that recognition of debt heterogeneity leads to new insights into the determinants of corporate capital structure. We first demonstrate that traditional capital structure studies that ignore debt heterogeneity miss a substantial fraction of capital structure variation. We then show that relative to high credit quality firms, low credit quality firms are more likely to have a multi-tiered capital structure consisting of both secured bank debt with tight covenants and subordinated non-bank debt with loose covenants. Further, while high credit quality firms enjoy access to a variety of sources of discretionary flexible sources of finance, low credit quality firms rely on tightly monitored secured bank debt for liquidity. The findings are similar when we focus on plausibly exogenous credit quality variation in a sample of "fallen angels," which are firms that are downgraded from investment grade to speculative grade by Moody's Investors Services. We discuss the extent to which these findings are consistent with existing theoretical models of debt structure in which firms simultaneously use multiple debt types to reduce incentive conflicts

We study how much of the top end of the income distribution is represented by four sectors—non-financial-firm top executives (Main Street); investment bankers and hedge, private equity, and mutual fund investors (Wall Street); corporate lawyers; and athletes and celebrities. Wall Street individuals comprise a higher percentage of the top income brackets than nonfinancial executives of public companies. While top executives’ representation in the top brackets has increased from 1994 to 2004, Wall Street's representation has likely increased even more. We discuss the implications of our findings for different explanations for the increased skewness at the highest income levels.

This paper analyzes the flow of state pension benefit payments relative to asset levels and contributions. Assuming future state contributions fund the full present value of new benefits, many state systems will run out of money in 10-20 years if some attempt is not made to improve the funding of liabilities that have already been accrued. The expected shortfalls raise the possibility that the federal government will be faced with a decision as to whether to bail out states driven to insolvency by their pension programs.

We discuss the true economic funding status of state public pension plans and show that government accounting standards require states to use procedures that severely understate their liabilities. We analyze how state pension funds reached this state of affairs, present a distribution of future outcomes, and discuss why public pension funding and investment policy matter for taxpayers.

The asset allocation of defined benefit pension plans is a setting where both risk-shifting and risk-management incentives are likely be present. Empirically, firms with poorly funded pension plans and weak credit ratings allocate a greater share of pension fund assets to safer securities such as government debt and cash, whereas firms with well-funded pension plans and strong credit ratings invest more heavily in equity. These relations hold both in pooled regressions and within firms and plans over time. The incentive to limit costly financial distress plays a considerably larger role than risk shifting in explaining variation in pension fund investment policy among firms in the United States.

This paper simulates the distribution of retirement wealth under representative Defined Benefit (DB) and Defined Contribution (DC) plans. It uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to explore how asset returns, earnings histories, and retirement plan characteristics contribute to the variation in retirement wealth outcomes. Average retirement wealth accruals under current DC plans exceed average accruals under private sector DB plans, although DC plans are also more likely to generate very low retirement wealth outcomes. The comparison of current DC plans with more generous public sector DB plans is less definitive, because public sector DB plans are more generous on average than their private sector DB counterparts.

Managers appear to manipulate firm earnings through their characterizations of pension assets to capital markets and alter investment decisions to justify, and capitalize on, these manipulations. Managers are more aggressive with assumed long-term rates of return when their assumptions have a greater impact on reported earnings. Firms use higher assumed rates of return when they prepare to acquire other firms, when they are near critical earnings thresholds, and when their managers exercise stock options. Changes in assumed returns, in turn, influence pension plan asset allocations. Instrumental variables analysis indicates that 25 basis point increases in assumed rates are associated with 5 percent increases in equity allocations.

I exploit sharply nonlinear funding rules for defined benefit pension plans in order to identify the dependence of corporate investment on internal financial resources in a large sample. Capital expenditures decline with mandatory contributions to DB pension plans, even when controlling for correlations between the pension funding status itself and the firm’s unobserved investment opportunities. The effect is particularly evident among firms that face financing constraints based on observable variables such as credit ratings. Investment also displays strong negative correlations with the part of mandatory contributions resulting solely from unexpected asset market movements.

If managers induce employees to hold company stock in defined contribution pension plans as a form of takeover defense, then changes in state laws that enhance managerial protection should lead to a reduction in employer stock in 401(k) plans. Delaware's mid-1990s validation of the poison pill in conjunction with a staggered board was followed by a significant decline in employee ownership within defined contribution plans for firms incorporated in Delaware. Evidence using governance data suggests that this is due to responses of firms with staggered boards. Binary choice models confirm that employee ownership in defined contribution plans lowers takeover probabilities.

Institutional investors of all types exhibit substantial home-state bias when investing in private equity (PE) funds. This effect is particularly pronounced for public pension funds, where the local overweighting amounts to 9.7% of the private equity portfolio on average, based on 5-year rolling average benchmarks. Public pension funds’ own-state investments perform significantly worse than their out-of-state investments, an average of 3-4 percentage points of net IRR per year, and those that that overweight their portfolios towards home-state investments also perform worse overall. These underperformance patterns are not evident for other types of institutional investors, such as endowments, foundations and corporate pension funds, and we do not observe similar overweighting or underperformance of investments in neighboring states. Overweighting in home state investments by public pension funds is greater in states with higher levels of corruption, although there is no positive correlation of underperformance with corruption for these investors. The overweighting and underperformance of local investments cost public pension funds between $0.9 and $1.2 billion per year, depending on the benchmark.

We calculate the increases in state and local revenues required to achieve full funding of state and local pension systems in the U.S. over the next 30 years. Without policy changes, contributions to these systems would have to immediately increase by a factor of 2.5, reaching 14.2% of the total own-revenue generated by state and local governments (taxes, fees and charges). This represents a tax increase of $1,398 per U.S. household per year, above and beyond revenue generated by expected economic growth. In thirteen states the necessary increases are more than $1,500 per household per year, and in five states they are more than $2,000 per household per year. Shifting all new employees onto defined contribution plans and Social Security still leaves required increases at an average of $1,223 per household. Even with a hard freeze of all benefits at today’s levels, contributions still have to rise by more than $800 per U.S. household to achieve full funding in 30 years. Accounting for endogenous shifts in the tax base in response to tax increases or spending cuts increases the dispersion in required incremental contributions among states.

The value of pension promises already made by US state governments will grow to approximately $7.9 trillion in 15 years. We study investment strategies of state pension plans and estimate the distribution of future funding outcomes. We conservatively predict a 50% chance of aggregate underfunding greater than $750 billion and a 25% chance of at least $1.75 trillion (in 2005 dollars). Adjusting for risk, the true intergenerational transfer is substantially larger. Insuring both taxpayers against funding deficits and plan participants against benefit reductions would cost almost $2 trillion today, even though governments portray state pensions as almost fully funded.

This paper examines the effects of changes in a firm’s financial condition on capital expenditures, as well as on the costs of raising external finance. Changes in pension fund asset values are largely reflected in the market value of the sponsor’s equity, and can be fully incorporated into pension-adjusted measures of book equity. The condition of the firm’s balance sheet, as measured by book and market leverage, has a statistically robust effect on capital investment, even when the variation in leverage is due strictly to pension fund asset performance. I provide evidence that variation in pension fund asset performance is unlikely to be correlated with the sponsor’s investment opportunities, especially within industries and in the presence of nonlinear profitability controls. Credit rating agencies are more likely to upgrade firms when the pension assets perform well and downgrade them when the pension assets perform poorly. Overall the evidence highlights the impact of borrowers’ net worth on the costs of external capital and is consistent with models of underinvestment in the presence of financial constraints. However, the magnitude of the effects is moderately small relative to the within-firm standard deviation of capital expenditures.

This paper examines how different asset allocation strategies over the course of a worker's career affect the distribution of retirement wealth and the expected utility of wealth at retirement. It considers both rules that allocate a constant portfolio fraction to various assets at all ages, as well as "lifecycle" rules that vary the mix of portfolio assets as the worker ages. The analysis simulates retirement wealth using asset returns that are drawn from the historical return distribution. The results suggest that the distribution of retirement wealth associated with typical lifecycle investment strategies is similar to that from age-invariant asset allocation strategies that set the equity share of the portfolio equal to the average equity share in the lifecycle strategies. There is substantial variation across workers with different characteristics in the expected utility from following different asset allocation strategies. The expected utility associated with different 401(k) asset allocation strategies, and the ranking of these strategies, is very sensitive to three parameters: the expected return on corporate stock, the worker's relative risk aversion, and the amount of non-401(k) wealth that the worker will have available at retirement. At modest levels of risk aversion, or in the presence of substantial non-401(k) wealth at retirement, the historical pattern of stock and bond returns implies that the expected utility of an all-stock investment allocation rule is greater than that from any of the more conservative strategies. Higher risk aversion or lower expected returns on stocks raise the expected utility of following lifecycle strategies or other strategies that reduce equity exposure throughout the lifetime.

The shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans in the United States has drawn new attention to the effect of participants' asset allocation decisions on their financial resources for retirement. This paper develops a stochastic simulation algorithm to evaluate the effect of holding a broadly diversified portfolio of common stocks, or a portfolio of index bonds, on the distribution of 401(k) account balances at retirement. We compare the alternative distributions of retirement wealth both by showing the empirical distribution of potential wealth values, and by computing the expected utility of these outcomes under standard assumptions about the structure of household preferences. Our analysis highlights the critical role of other sources of wealth, such as Social Security, defined benefit pension annuities, and saving outside retirement plans in determining the expected utility cost of holding equities in the retirement account. Our findings also demonstrate the importance of the equity premium in affecting investors' utility from different retirement asset allocations. Viewed from the beginning of a working career, and given the historical pattern of returns on stocks and bonds, a household that does not have extremely high risk aversion would achieve a higher expected utility by holding a portfolio of stocks rather than bonds.

This article investigates why many publicly listed corporations in the United States reduced or terminated the availability of defined benefit plans during 1998-2007. Firms limited benefit accruals in a variety of ways, including standard and distress terminations, freezes, and conversions to cash balance plans. While the decision to change the pension plan is related to the financial health of the sponsor, total benefit costs do not immediately decline when pension plans are frozen, as contributions to defined contribution plans increase almost immediately. However, we find that ‘freeze firms’ experience significant reductions in their projected benefit obligations of their defined benefit plans. This implies that most of the cost savings are generated from avoiding defined benefit plan accruals relating to future salary increases for current plan participants.

A GM bailout would delay restructuring and ultimately destroy jobs. Restructuring under Chapter 11 is the best solution, but credit market conditions require the US government to provide transitional, “Debtor in Possession” financing. To avoid political interference, the actual lending decisions should be made by a commercial bank with a stake in the outcome