Depending on whether the existing debt is below or above target debt level, some firms are more willing to raise debt (if needed) than others. In this article, I show that firms are more likely to both increase and smooth dividends when they have below‐target debt after controlling for access to debt. Additionally, I show that when firms have below‐target debt, they use a greater fraction of proceeds from net debt issues to finance dividends. I obtain similar results when repeating the tests with total payouts (dividends plus repurchases) instead of dividends only.

中文翻译：

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杠杆目标和支出政策

根据现有债务是低于还是高于目标债务水平，一些公司比其他公司更愿意举债（如果需要）。在本文中，我表明，在控制债务的获得之后，如果企业的债务低于目标，则企业更有可能既增加股息又使股息趋于平稳。此外，我表明，当公司的债务低于目标时，他们会将发行净债务的收益中较大一部分用于为股息筹集资金。当重复总支出（股息加上回购）而不是仅股息时，我得到类似的结果。