Bank Competition and Leverage Adjustments

We test whether bank competition affects firms' leverage adjustment speeds. Using Chinese data where bank concentration varies across both years and provinces, we find that underlevered firms move to their target leverage faster when bank competition is high. Tests surrounding an exogenous shock to bank competition lead to the same conclusion. We also find that small firms and nonstate-owned firms exhibit faster leverage adjustments when bank competition is high, which is consistent with the conjecture that bank risk taking increases with competition.
Recent research establishes that firms have target capital structures (Frank and Goyal, 2009), but firms make partial/incomplete adjustments toward their targets (e.g., Leary and Roberts, 2005; Flannery and Rangan, 2006; [...]