Word.ws English Dictionary

overlevered

overlevered adjective: having too much leverage.

Adjective

overlevered (not comparable)

  1. Having too much leverage.
    • Once the “acceptable” amount of leverage has been passed, the rate of interest on debt will begin to rise and may cause the cost of capital for the overlevered firm to increase.1967 September 1, Nevins D. Baxter, “Leverage, Risk of Ruin and the Cost of Capital”, in The Journal of Finance, volume 22, number 3, page 395 of 395-403
    • Before merger, bidders have significantly more financial slack than a large general sample of firms. Even without including cash as “negative debt,” bidders are found to be significantly less levered than a control sample. These findings are contrary to Melicher and Rush (1973), Mueller (1980)...1988 June 1, Robert F. Bruner, “The Use of Excess Cash and Debt Capacity as a Motive for Merger”, in The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, volume 23, number 2, page 214 of 199–217
    Antonyms:
    underlevered

Examples of overlevered in a sentence

  • These findings are contrary to Melicher and Rush (1973), Mueller (1980), Shrieves and Pashley (1984), and Weston and Mansinghka (1971), all of which found bidders to be overlevered.1988 June 1, Robert F. Bruner, “The Use of Excess Cash and Debt Capacity as a Motive for Merger”, in The Journal of Financial and...
  • Equity issuers are underlevered rather than overlevered prior to the issue.2004 October 1, Armen Hovakimian, “The Role of Target Leverage in Security Issues and Repurchases”, in The Journal of Business, volume 77...
  • Some firms may have been concerned about appearing overlevered.2005 July 1, Hong Chen, Murray Z. Frank, Owen Q. Wu, “What Actually Happened to the Inventories of American Companies between 1981 and...
  • Note, however, that bank competition is not likely to impact the leverage adjustment speeds of overlevered firms.2017 February 8, Fuxiu Jiang; Zhan Jiang; Jicheng Huang; Kenneth A. Kim, John R. Nofsinger, “Bank Competition and Leverage Adjustments”, in...

Antonyms of overlevered

Origin of overlevered

From over- + levered.

Questions about overlevered

What does overlevered mean?
Overlevered means having too much leverage.
How do you use overlevered in a sentence?
These findings are contrary to Melicher and Rush (1973), Mueller (1980), Shrieves and Pashley (1984), and Weston and Mansinghka (1971), all of which found bidders to be overlevered.
What part of speech is overlevered?
Overlevered is an adjective.

Words near overlevered in the dictionary

  1. overlevels
  2. overleverage
  3. overleveraged
  4. overleverages
  5. overleveraging
  6. overlevered
  7. overlewd
  8. overlexicalization
  9. Overley
  10. Overleys
  11. overliberal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: overlevered (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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