最优资本结构对经济及其它价值的作用外文翻译

外文翻译The influence of corporate governance on the relation betweencapital structure and valueMaterial Source:Corporate Governance Author:Maurizio La Rocca Researches in Business Economics, and in particular, in Business economics and Finance have always analyzed the processes of economic value creation as their main field of studies. Starting from the provocative work of Modigliani and Miller (1958), capital structure became one of the main elements that following studies have shown as being essential in determining value. Half a century of research on capital structure attempted to verify the presence of an optimal capital structure that could amplify the company’s ability to create value.There is again quite a bit of interest in the topic of firm capital structure, on whether or not it is necessary to consider the important contribution offered by corporate governance as a variable that can explain the connection between capital structure and value, controlling opportunistic behavior in the economic relations between shareholders, debt holders and managers. In this sense, capital structure can influence firm value.Therefore, this paper examines the theoretical relationship between capital structure, corporate governance and value, formulating an interesting proposal for future research. The second paragraph describes the theoretical and empirical approach on capital structure and value, identifying the main threads of study. After having explained the concept of corporate governance and its connection with firm value, the relationship between capital structure, corporate governance and value, as well as the causes behind them, will be investigated.Capital structure: relation with corporate value and main research streams When looking at the most important theoretical contributions on the relation between capital structure and value, it becomes immediately evident that there is a substantial difference between the early theories and the more recent ones. Influence of corporate governance on the relation between capital structure and valueCapital structure can be analyzed by looking at the rights and attributes that characterize the firm’s assets and that influence, with different levels of intensity,governance activities. Equity and debt, therefore, must be considered as both financial instruments and corporate governance instruments. (Williamson, 1988): debt subordinates governance activities to stricter management, while equity allows for greater flexibility and decision making power. It can thus be inferred that when capital structure becomes an instrument of corporate governance, not only the mix between debt and equity and their well known consequences as far as taxes go must be taken into consideration. The way in which cash flow is allocated and, even more importantly, how the right to make decisions and manage the firm (voting rights) is dealt with must also be examined. For example, venture capitalists are particularly sensitive to how capital structure and financing contracts are laid out, so that an optimal corporate governance can be guaranteed while incentives and checks for management behavior are well established (Zingales, 2000).How corporate governance can potentially have a relevant influence on the relation between capital structure and value, with an effect of mediation and/or moderation.On one hand, a change in how debt and equity are dealt with influences firm governance activities by modifying the structure of incentives and managerial control. If, through the mix debt and equity, different categories of investors all converge within the firm, where they have different types of influence on governance decisions, then managers will tend to have preferences when determining how one of these categories will prevail when d efining the firm’s capital structure. Even more importantly, through a specific design of debt contracts and equity it is possible to considerably increase firm governance efficiency.On the other hand, even corporate governance influences choices regarding capital structure. Myers (1984) and Myers and Majluf (1984) show how firm financing choices are made by management following an order of preference; in this case, if the manager chooses the financing resources it can be presumed that she is avoiding a reduction of her decision making power by accepting the discipline represented by debt. Internal resource financing allows management to prevent other subjects from intervening in their decision making processes. De Jong (2002) reveals how in the Netherlands managers try to avoid using debt so that their decision making power remains unchecked. Zwiebel (1996) has observed that managers don’t voluntarily accept the ‘‘discipline’’ of debt; other governance mechanisms impose that debt is issued. Jensen (1986) noted that decisions to increase firm debt are voluntarily made by management when it intends to‘‘reassure’’ stakeholders that its governance decisions are ‘‘proper’’.The B-C-A relation that indicates the relation between capital structure a nd value is actually explained thanks to a third variable (corporate governanc e) that ‘‘intervenes’’ (and for this reason is called an ‘‘intervening variable’’) in the relation between capital structure and value. This would create a ‘‘bri dge’’ by mediating between lever age and value, thus showing a connection th at otherwise would not be visible. It can not be said that there is no relation between capital structure and value (Modigliani and Miller, 1958), but the c onnection is mediated and, in an economic sense, it is formalized through a causal chain between variables. In other words, it is not possible to see a dir ect relation between capital structure and value, but in reality capital structure influences firm governance that is connected to firm value.Furthermore, the relation between capital structure and corporate governan ce becomes extremely important when considering its fundamental role in val ue generation and distribution (Bhagat and Jefferis, 2002). Through its interact ion with other instruments of corporate governance, firm capital structure bec omes capable of protecting an efficient value creation process, by establishing the ways in which the generated value is later distributed (Zingales, 1998); i n other words the surplus created is influenced (Zingales, 2000).Therefore, the relation between capital structure and value could be set u p differently if it were mediated or moderated by corporate governance. None theless, capital structure could also intervene or interact in the relation betwee n corporate governance and value. In this manner a complementary relationshi p, or one where substitution is possible, could emerge between capital structu re and other corporate governance variables. Debt could have a marginal role of disciplining management when there is a shareholder participating in own ership or when there is state participation. To the contrary, when other forms of discipline are lacking in the governance structure, capital structure could be exactly the mechanism capable of protecting efficient corporate governance, while preserving firm value.ConclusionThis paper defines a theoretical approach that can contribute in clearing up the relation between capital structure, corporate governance and value, whi le they also promote a more precise design for empirical research. Capital str ucture represents one of many instruments that can preserve corporate governance efficiency and protect its ability to create value . Therefore, this thread of research affirms that if investment policies allow for value creation, financing policies, together with other governance instruments, can assure that invest ment policies are carried out efficiently while firm value is protected from op portunistic behavior.In conclusion, this paper defines a theoretical model that contributes to c larifying the relations between capital structure, corporate governance and firm value, while promoting, as an aim for future research, a verification of the validity of this model through application of the analysis to a wide sample of firms and to single firms. To study the interaction between capital structure, corporate governance and value when analyzing a wide sample of firms, loo k at problems of endogeneity and reciprocal causality, and make sure there is complementarity between all the three factors. Such an analysis deserves the application of refined econometric techniques. Moreover, these relations shoul d be investigated in a cross-country analysis, to catch the role of country-spe cific factors.译文资本结构和企业价值之间的关系对公司治理的影响资料来源:公司治理作者：莫里吉奥拉罗卡在商业经济的研究中，尤其是经营经济学和金融学，总是将分析创造经济价值的进程作为他们研究的主要领域。

资本结构、股权结构与公司绩效外文翻译中文2825字1868单词外文文献：Capital structure, equity ownership and firm performanceDimitris Margaritis, Maria Psillaki 1Abstract：This paper investigates the relationship between capital structure, ownership structure and firm performance using a sample of French manufacturing firms. We employ non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods to empirically construct the industry’s ‘best practice’frontier and measure firm efficiency as the distance from that frontier. Using these performance measures we examine if more efficient firms choose more or less debt in their capital structure. We summarize the contrasting effects of efficiency on capital structure in terms of two competing hypotheses: the efficiency-risk and franchise value hypotheses. Using quantile regressions we test the effect of efficiency on leverage and thus the empirical validity of the two competing hypotheses across different capital structure choices. We also test the direct relationship from leverage to efficiency stipulated by the Jensen and Meckling (1976) agency cost model. Throughout this analysis we consider the role of ownership structure and type on capital structure and firm performance.Firm performance, capital structure and ownershipConflicts of interest between owners-managers and outside shareholders as well as those between controlling and minority shareholders lie at the heart of the corporate governance literature (Berle and Means, 1932; Jensen and Meckling, 1976;Shleifer and Vishny, 1986). While there is a relatively large literature on the effects of ownership on firm performance (see for example, Morck et al., 1988; McConnell and Servaes, 1990; Himmelberg et al., 1999), the relationship between ownership structure and capital structure remains largely unexplored. On the other hand, a voluminous literature is devoted to capital structure and its effects on corporate performance –see the surveys by Harris and Raviv (1991) and Myers (2001). An emerging consensus that comes out of the corporate governance literature (see Mahrt-Smith, 2005) is that the interactions between capital structure and ownership structure impact on firm values. Yet theoretical arguments alone cannot unequivocally predict these relationships (see Morck et al., 1988) and the empirical evidence that we have often appears to be contradictory. In part these conflicting results arise from difficulties empirical researchers face in obtaining direct measures of the magnitude of agency costs that are not confounded by factors that are beyond the control of management (Berger and Bonaccorsi di Patti, 2006). In the remainder of this section we briefly review the literature in this area focusing on the main hypotheses of interest for this study.Firm performance and capital structureThe agency cost theory is premised on the idea that the interests of the company’s managers and its shareholders are not perfectly aligned. In their seminal paper Jensen and Meckling (1976) emphasized the importance of the agency costs of equity arising from the separation of ownership and control of firms whereby managers tend to maximize their own utility rather than the value of the firm. These conflicts may occur in situations where managers have incentives to take1来源：Journal of Banking & Finance , 2010 (34) : 621–632，本文翻译的是第二部分excessive risks as part of risk shifting investment strategies. This leads us to Jensen’s (1986) “free cash flow theory”where as stated by Jensen (1986, p. 323) “the pro blem is how to motivate managers to disgorge the cash rather than investing it below the cost of capital or wasting it on organizational inefficiencies.”Thus high debt ratios may be used as a disciplinary device to reduce managerial cash flow waste through the threat of liquidation (Grossman and Hart, 1982) or through pressure to generate cash flows to service debt (Jensen, 1986). In these situations, debt will have a positive effect on the value of the firm.Agency costs can also exist from conflicts between debt and equity investors. These conflicts arise when there is a risk of default. The risk of default may create what Myers (1977) referred to as an“underinvestment”or “debt overhang”problem. In this case, debt will have a negative effect on the value of the firm. Building on Myers (1977) and Jensen (1986), Stulz (1990) develops a model in which debt financing is shown to mitigate overinvestment problems but aggravate the underinvestment problem. The model predicts that debt can have both a positive and a negative effect on firm performance and presumably both effects are present in all firms. We allow for the presence of both effects in the empirical specification of the agency cost model. However we expect the impact of leverage to be negative overall. We summarize this in terms of our first testable hypothesis. According to the agency cost hypothesis (H1) higher leverage is expected to lower agency costs, reduce inefficiency and thereby lead to an improvement in firm’s performance.Reverse causality from firm performance to capital structure But firm performance may also affect the choice of capital structure. Berger and Bonaccorsi di Patti (2006) stipulate that more efficient firms are more likely to earn a higher return for a given capital structure, and that higher returns can act as a buffer against portfolio risk so that more efficient firms are in a better position to substitute equity for debt in their capital structure. Hence under the efficiency-risk hypothesis (H2), more efficient firms choose higher leverage ratios because higher efficiency is expected to lower the costs of bankruptcy and financial distress. In essence, the efficiency-risk hypothesis is a spin-off of the trade-off theory of capital structure whereby differences in efficiency, all else equal, enable firms to fine tune their optimal capital structure.It is also possible that firms which expect to sustain high efficiency rates into the future will choose lower debt to equity ratios in an attempt to guard the economic rents or franchise value generated by these efficiencies from the threat of liquidation (see Demsetz, 1973; Berger and Bonaccorsi di Patti, 2006). Thus in addition to a equity for debt substitution effect, the relationship between efficiency and capital structure may also be characterized by the presence of an income effect. Under the franchise-value hypothesis (H2a) more efficient firms tend to hold extra equity capital and therefore, all else equal, choose lower leverage ratios to protect their future income or franchise value.Thus the efficiency-risk hypothesis (H2) and the franchise-value hypothesis (H2a) yield opposite predictions regarding the likely effects of firm efficiency on the choice of capital structure. Although we cannot identify the separate substitution andincome effects our empirical analysis is able to determine which effect dominates the other across the spectrum of different capital structure choices.Ownership structure and the agency costs of debt and equity.The relationship between ownership structure and firm performance dates back to Berle andMeans (1932) who argued that widely held corporations in the US, in which ownership of capital is dispersed among small shareholders and control is concentrated in the hands of insiders tend to underperform. Following from this, Jensen and Meckling (1976) develop more formally the classical owner-manager agency problem. They advocate that managerial share-ownership may reduce managerial incentives to consume perquisites, expropriate shareholders’wealth or to engage in other sub-optimal activities and thus helps in aligning the interests of managers and shareholders which in turn lowers agency costs. Along similar lines, Shleifer and Vishny (1986) show that large external equity holders can mitigate agency conflicts because of their strong incentives to monitor and discipline management.In contrast Demsetz (1983) and Fama and Jensen (1983) point out that a rise in insider share-ownership stakes may also be associated with adverse ‘entrenchment’effects tha t can lead to an increase in managerial opportunism at the expense of outside investors. Whether firm value would be maximized in the presence of large controlling shareholders depends on the entrenchment effect (Claessens et al., 2002; Villalonga and Amit, 2006; Dow and McGuire, 2009). Several studies document either a direct (e.g., Shleifer and Vishny, 1986; Claessens et al., 2002; Hu and Zhou, 2008) or a non-monotonic (e.g., Morck et al., 1988;McConnell and Servaes, 1995; Davies et al., 2005) relationship between ownership structure and firm performance while others (e.g., Demsetz and Lehn, 1985; Himmelberg et al., 1999; Demsetz and Villalonga, 2001) find no relation between ownership concentration and firm performance.Family firms are a special class of large shareholders with unique incentive structures. For example, concerns over family and business reputation and firm survival would tend to mitigate the agency costs of outside debt and outside equity (Demsetz and Lehn, 1985; Anderson et al., 2003) although controlling family shareholders may still expropriate minority shareholders (Claessens et al., 2002; Villalonga and Amit, 2006). Several studies (e.g., Anderson and Reeb, 2003a; Villalonga and Amit, 2006; Maury, 2006; King and Santor, 2008) report that family firms especially those with large personal owners tend to outperform non-family firms. In addition, the empirical findings of Maury (2006) suggest that large controlling family ownership in Western Europe appears to benefit rather than harm minority shareholders. Thus we expect that the net effect of family ownership on firm performance will be positive.Large institutional investors may not, on the other hand, have incentives to monitor management (Villalonga and Amit, 2006) and they may even coerce with management (McConnell and Servaes, 1990; Claessens et al., 2002; Cornett et al., 2007). In addition, Shleifer and Vishny (1986) and La Porta et al. (2002) argue that equity concentration is more likely to have a positive effect on firm performance in situations where control by large equity holders may act as a substitute for legal protection in countries with weak investor protection and less developed capital markets where they also classify Continental Europe.We summarize the contrasting ownership effects of incentive alignment and entrenchment on firm performance in terms of two competing hypotheses. Under the ‘convergence-of-interest hypothesis’(H3) more concentrated ownership should have a positive effect on firm performance. And under the ownership entrenchment hypothesis (H3a) the effect of ownership concentration on firm performance is expected to be negative.The presence of ownership entrenchment and incentive alignment effects also has implications for the firm’s capital structure choice. We assess these effects empirically. As external blockholders have strong incentives to reduce managerial opportunism they may prefer to use debtas a governance mechanism to control management’s consumption of perquisites (Grossman and Hart, 1982). In that case firms with large external blockholdings are likely to have higher debt ratios at least up to the point where the risk of bankruptcy may induce them to lower debt. Family firms may also use higher debt levels to the extent that they are perceived to be less risky by debtholders (Anderson et al., 2003). On the other hand the relation between leverage and insider share-ownership may be negative in situations where managerial blockholders choose lower debt to protect their non-diversifiable human capital and wealth invested in the firm (Friend and Lang, 1988). Brailsford et al. (2002) report a non-linear relationship between managerial share-ownership and leverage. At low levels of managerial ownership, agency conflicts necessitate the use of more debt but as managers become entrenched at high levels of managerial ownership they seek to reduce their risks and they use less debt. Anderson and Reeb (2003) find that insider ownership by managers or families has no effect on leveragewhile King and Santor (2008) report that both family firms and firms controlled by financial institutions carry more debt in their capital structure.外文翻译：资本结构、股权结构与公司绩效摘要：本文通过对法国制造业公司的抽样调查，研究资本结构、所有权结构和公司绩效的关系。

本科毕业设计（论文）中英文对照翻译(此文档为word格式,下载后您可任意修改编辑!)文献出处:Ashkanasy N M. The study on capital structure theory and the optimization of enterprise capital [J]. Journal of Management, 2016, 5(3): 235-254.原文The study on capital structure theory and the optimization ofenterprise capital structureAshkanasy N MAbstractIn this paper, corporate finance is an important content of modern enterprise management decision. Around the existence of optimal capitalstructure has been a lot of controversy. Given investment decisions, whether an enterprise to change its value by changing the capital structure and the cost of capital, namely whether there is a market make the enterprise value maximization, or make the enterprise capital structure of minimizing the cost of capital? To this problem has different answers in different stages of development, has formed many theory of capital structure.Key words: Capital structure; financial structure; Optimization; Financial leverage1 IntroductionIn financial theory, capital structure due to the different understanding of "capital" in the broad sense and narrow sense two explanations: one explanation is that the "capital" as all funding sources, the structure of the generalized capital structure refers to the entire capital, the relationship between the contrast of their own capital and debt capital, as the American scholar Alan c. Shapiro points out that "the company's capital structure - all the debt and equity financing; an alternative explanation is that if the" capital "is defined as a long-term funding sources, capital structure refers to the narrow sense of their own capital and long-term debt capital, and the tension and the short-term debt capital as the business capital management. Whether it is a broad concept ornarrow understanding of the capital structure is to discuss the proportion of equity capital and debt capital relations. 2 The capital structure theory Capital structure theory has experienced a process of gradually forming, developing and perfecting. First proposed the theory of American economist David Durand (David Durand) thinks that enterprise's capital structure is in accordance with the method of net income, net operating income method and traditional method, in 1958 di Gayle Anne (Franco Modigliani and Miller (Mertor Miller) and put forward the famous MM theory, created the modern capital structure theory, on this basis, the later generations and further put forward many new theory: 2.1 Net Income Theory (Net Income going) Net income theory on the premise of two assumptions --, investors with a fixed proportion of investment valuation or enterprise's net income. Enterprises to raise debt funds needed for a fixed rate. Therefore, the theory is that: the enterprise use of debt financing is always beneficial, can reduce the comprehensive cost of capital of enterprise. This is because the debt financing in the whole capital of enterprise, the bigger the share, the comprehensive cost of capital is more c lose to the cost of debt, and because the cost of debt is generally low, so, the higher the debt level, comprehensive capital cost is lower, the greater the enterprise value. When the debt ratio reached 100%, the firm will achieve maximum value.2.2 Theory of Net Operating Income (Net Operating Income going) Netoperating income theory is that, regardless of financial leverage, debt interest rates are fixed. If enterprises increase the lower cost of debt capital, but even if the cost of debt remains unchanged, but due to the increased the enterprise risk, can also lead to the rising cost of equity capital, it a liter of a fall, just offset, the enterprise cost of capital remain unchanged. Is derived as a result, the theory "" does not exist an optimal capital structure of the conclusion.2.3 Traditional Theory (Traditional going) Traditional theory is that the net income and net operating income method of compromise. It thinks, the enterprise use of financial leverage although will lead to rising cost of equity, but within limits does not completely offset the benefits of using the low cost of debt, so can make comprehensive capital cost reduction, increase enterprise value. But once exceed this limit, rights and interests of the rising cost of no longer can be offset by the low cost of debt, the comprehensive cost of capital will rise again. Since then, the cost of debt will rise, leading to a comprehensive capital costs rise more rapidly. Comprehensive cost of capital from falling into a turning point, is the lowest, at this point, to achieve the optimal capital structure. The above three kinds of capital structure theory is referred to as "early capital structure theory", their common features are: three theories are in corporate and personal income tax rate is zero under the condition of the proposed. Three theories and considering the capital structure of the dual effects of the cost of capital and enterprise value.Three theories are prior to 1958. Many scholars believe that the theory is not based on thorough analysis.3 Related theories3.1 Balance TheoryIt centered on the MM theory of modern capital structure theory development to peak after tradeoff theory. Trade-off theory is based on corporate MM model and miller, revised to reflect the financial pinch cost (also known as the financial crisis cost) and a model of agent cost.(1) the cost of financial constraints. Many enterprises always experience of financial constraints, some of them will be forced to go bankrupt. When the financial constraints but also not bankruptcy occurs, may appear the following situation: disputes between owners and creditors often leads to inventory and fixed assets on the material damaged or obsolete. Attorney fees, court fees and administrative costs to devour enterprise wealth, material loss and plus the legal and administrative expenses referred to as the "direct costs" of bankruptcy. Financial pinch will only occur in business with debt, no liability companies won't get into the mud. So with more debt, the fixed interest rate, and the greater the profitability of the probability of large leading to financial constraints and the cost of the higher the probability of occurrence. Financial pinch probability high will reduce the present value of the enterprise, to improve the cost ofcapital.(2) the agency cost. Because shareholders exists the possibility of using a variety of ways from the bondholders who benefit, bonds must have a number of protective constraint clauses. These terms and conditions in a certain extent constrained the legal management of the enterprise. Also must supervise the enterprise to ensure compliance with these terms and conditions, the cost of supervision and also upon the shareholders with higher debt costs. Supervise cost that agency cost is will raise the cost of debt to reduce debt interest. When the tax benefits and liabilities of financial constraints and agency costs when balance each other, namely the costs and benefits offset each other, determine the optimal capital structure. Equilibrium theory emphasizes the liabilities increase will cause the risk of bankruptcy and rising costs, so as to restrict the enterprise infinite pursuit of the behavior of tax preferential policies. In this sense, the enterprise the best capital structure is the balance of tax revenue and financial constraints caused by all kinds of costs as a result, when the marginal debt tax shield benefit is equal to the marginal cost of financial constraints, the enterprise value maximum, to achieve the optimal capital structure.3.2 Asymmetric Information TheoryAsymmetric Information and found)Due to the trade-off theory has long been limited to bankruptcy cost and tax benefit both conceptual framework, to the late 1970 s, the theory is centered on asymmetricinformation theory of new capital structure theory. So-called asymmetric information is in the information management and investors are not equal, managers than investors have more and more accurate information, and managers try to existing shareholders rather than new seeks the best interests of shareholders, so if business prospect is good, the manager will not issue new shares, but if the prospects, will make the cost of issuing new shares to raise too much, this factor must be considered in the capital structure decision. The significance of these findings to the enterprise's financial policy lies in: first it prompted enterprise reserve a certain debt capacity so as to internal lack of funding for new investment projects in the future debt financing. In addition, in order to avoid falling stock prices, managers often don't have to equity financing, and prefer to use external funding. The central idea is: internal financing preference, if you need external finance, preferences of creditor's rights financing. Can in order to save the ability to issue new debt at any time, the number of managers to borrow is usually less than the number of enterprises can take, in order to keep some reserves. Ross (s. Ross) first systematically introduce the theory of asymmetric information from general economics enterprise capital structure analysis, then, tal (e. Talmon), haeckel (Heikel) development from various aspects, such as the theory. After the 1980 s, thanks to the new institutional economics, and gradually formed a financial contract theory, corporate governance structure theory of capitalstructure theory, both of which emphasize enterprise contractual and incomplete contract, financial contract theory focuses on the design of optimal financial contract, and the arrangement of enterprise governance structure theory focuses on the right, focuses on the analysis of the relationship between capital structure and corporate governance.4 the capital structure theory of adaptability analysis On the one hand, capital structure theory especially the theory of modern capital structure is the important contribution is not only put forward "the existence of the optimal capital structure" this financial proposition, and that the optimal combination of the capital structure, objectively and make us on capital structure and its influence on the enterprise value have a clear understanding. The essence of these theories has direct influence and infiltrate into our country financial theory, and gives us enlightenment in many aspects: Because of various financing way, channel in financing costs, risks, benefits, constraints, as well as differences, seeking suitable capital structure is the enterprise financial management, especially the important content of financing management, must cause our country attaches great importance to the financial theory and financial practice. Capital structure decision despite the enterprise internal and external relationships and factor of restriction and influence, but its decision-making is the enterprise, the enterprise to the factors related to capital structure and the relationship between the quantitativeand qualitative analysis, discusses some principles and methods of enterprise capital structure optimization decision. Any enterprise capital structure in the design, all should leave room, maintain appropriate maneuver ability of financing, the financing environment in order to cope with the volatility and deal with unexpected events occur at any time. In general, businesses leverage ratio is high, has an adverse effect on the whole social and economic development, easily led to the decrease of the enterprise itself the economic benefits and losses and bankruptcies, deepen the entire social and economic development is not stable, increase the financial burden, cause inflation, not conducive to the transformation of industrial structure, and lower investment efficiency. Therefore, the enterprise capital structure should be in accordance with the business owners, creditors, and the public can bear the risk of the society in different aspects.译文资本结构理论与企业资本结构优化Ashkanasy N M摘要企业融资是现代企业经营决策的一项重要内容。

外文翻译Capital Structure and Firm Performance Material Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve SystemAuthor: Allen N. BergerAgency costs represent important problems in corporate governance in both financial and nonfinancial industries. The separation of ownership and control in a professionally managed firm may result in managers exerting insufficient work effort, indulging in perquisites, choosing inputs or outputs that suit their own preferences, or otherwise failing to maximize firm value. In effect, the agency costs of outside ownership equal the lost value from professional managers maximizing their own utility, rather than the value of the firm.Theory suggests that the choice of capital structure may help mitigate these agency costs. Under the agency costs hypothesis, high leverage or a low equity/asset ratio reduces the agency costs of outside equity and increases firm value by constraining or encouraging managers to act more in the interests of shareholders. Since the seminal paper by Jensen and Meckling (1976), a vast literature on such agency-theoretic explanations of capital structure has developed (see Harris and Raviv 1991 and Myers 2001 for reviews). Greater financial leverage may affect managers and reduce agency costs through the threat of liquidation, which causes personal losses to managers of salaries, reputation, perquisites, etc. (e.g., Grossman and Hart 1982, Williams 1987), and through pressure to generate cash flow to pay interest expenses (e.g., Jensen 1986). Higher leverage can mitigate conflicts between shareholders and managers concerning the choice of investment (e.g., Myers 1977), the amount of risk to undertake (e.g., Jensen and Meckling 1976, Williams 1987), the conditions under which the firm is liquidated (e.g., Harris and Raviv 1990), and dividend policy (e.g., Stulz 1990).A testable prediction of this class of models is that increasing the leverage ratio should result in lower agency costs of outside equity and improved firm performance, all else held equal. However, when leverage becomes relatively high, further increases generate significant agency costs of outside debt – including higher expected costs of bankruptcy or financial distress – arising from conflicts between bondholders and shareholders.1 Because it is difficult to distinguish empiricallybetween the two sources of agency costs, we follow the literature and allow the relationship between total agency costs and leverage to be non-monotonic.Despite the importance of this theory, there is at best mixed empirical evidence in the extant literature (see Harris and Raviv 1991, Titman 2000, and Myers 2001 for reviews). Tests of the agency costs hypothesis typically regress measures of firm performance on the equity capital ratio or other indicator of leverage plus some control variables. At least three problems appear in the prior studies that we address in our application.First, the measures of firm performance are usually ratios fashioned from financial statements or stock market prices, such as industry-adjusted operating margins or stock market returns. These measures do not net out the effects of differences in exogenous market factors that affect firm value, but are beyond management’s control and therefore cannot reflect agency costs. Thus, the tests may be confounded by factors that are unrelated to agency costs. As well, these studies generally do not set a separate benchmark for each firm’s performance that would be realized if agency costs were minimized.We address the measurement problem by using profit efficiency as our indicator of firm performance. The link between productive efficiency and agency costs was first suggested by Stigler (1976), and profit efficiency represents a refinement of the efficiency concept developed since that time.2 Profit efficiency evaluates how close a firm is to earning the profit that a best-practice firm would earn facing the same exogenous conditions. This has the benefit of controlling for factors outside the control of management that are not part of agency costs. In contrast, comparisons of standard financial ratios, stock market returns, and similar measures typically do not control for these exogenous factors. Even when the measures used in the literature are industry adjusted, they may not account for important differences across firms within an industry –such as local market conditions – as we are able to do with profit efficiency. In addition, the performance of a best-practice firm under the same exogenous conditions is a reasonable benchmark for how the firm would be expected to perform if agency costs were minimized.Second, the prior research generally does not take into account the possibility of reverse causation from performance to capital structure. If firm performance affects the choice of capital structure, then failure to take this reverse causality into account may result in simultaneous-equations bias. That is, regressions of firmperformance on a measure of leverage may confound the effects of capital structure on performance with the effects of performance on capital structure.We address this problem by allowing for reverse causality from performance to capital structure. We discuss below two hypotheses for why firm performance may affect the choice of capital structure, the efficiency-risk hypothesis and the franchise-value hypothesis. We construct a two-equation structural model and estimate it using two-stage least squares (2SLS). An equation specifying profit efficiency as a function of the firm’s equity capital ratio and other variables is use d to test the agency costs hypothesis, and an equation specifying the equity capital ratio as a function of the firm’s profit efficiency and other variables is used to test the net effects of the efficiency-risk and franchise-value hypotheses. Both equations are econometrically identified through exclusion restrictions that are consistent with the theories.Third, some, but not all of the prior studies did not take ownership structure into account. Under virtually any theory of agency costs, ownership structure is important, since it is the separation of ownership and control that creates agency costs (e.g., Barnea, Haugen, and Senbet 1985). Greater insider shares may reduce agency costs, although the effect may be reversed at very high levels of insider holdings (e.g., Morck, Shleifer, and Vishny 1988). As well, outside block ownership or institutional holdings tend to mitigate agency costs by creating a relatively efficient monitor of the managers (e.g., Shleifer and Vishny 1986). Exclusion of the ownership variables may bias the test results because the ownership variables may be correlated with the dependent variable in the agency cost equation (performance) and with the key exogenous variable (leverage) through the reverse causality hypotheses noted above.To address this third problem, we include ownership structure variables in the agency cost equation explaining profit efficiency. We include insider ownership, outside block holdings, and institutional holdings.Our application to data from the banking industry is advantageous because of the abundance of quality data available on firms in this industry. In particular, we have detailed financial data for a large number of firms producing comparable products with similar technologies, and information on market prices and other exogenous conditions in the local markets in which they operate. In addition, some studies in this literature find evidence of the link between the efficiency of firms and variables that are recognized to affect agency costs, including leverage andownership structure (see Berger and Mester 1997 for a review).Although banking is a regulated industry, banks are subject to the same type of agency costs and other influences on behavior as other industries. The banks in the sample are subject to essentially equal regulatory constraints, and we focus on differences across banks, not between banks and other firms. Most banks are well above the regulatory capital minimums, and our results are based primarily on differences at the margin, rather than the effects of regulation. Our test of the agency costs hypothesis using data from one industry may be built upon to test a number of corporate finance hypotheses using information on virtually any industry.We test the agency costs hypothesis of corporate finance, under which high leverage reduces the agency costs of outside equity and increases firm value by constraining or encouraging managers to act more in the interests of shareholders. Our use of profit efficiency as an indicator of firm performance to measure agency costs, our specification of a two-equation structural model that takes into account reverse causality from firm performance to capital structure, and our inclusion of measures of ownership structure address problems in the extant empirical literature that may help explain why prior empirical results have been mixed. Our application to the banking industry is advantageous because of the detailed data available on a large number of comparable firms and the exogenous conditions in their local markets. Although banks are regulated, we focus on differences across banks that are driven by corporate governance issues, rather than any differences in-regulation, given that all banks are subject to essentially the same regulatory framework and most banks are well above the regulatory capital minimums.Our findings are consistent with the agency costs hypothesis – higher leverage or a lower equity capital ratio is associated with higher profit efficiency, all else equal. The effect is economically significant as well as statistically significant. An increase in leverage as represented by a 1 percentage point decrease in the equity capital ratio yields a predicted increase in profit efficiency of about 6 percentage points, or a gain of about 10% in actual profits at the sample mean. This result is robust to a number of specification changes, including different measures of performance (standard profit efficiency, alternative profit efficiency, and return on equity), different econometric techniques (two-stage least squares and OLS), different efficiency measurement methods (distribution-free and fixed-effects), different samples (the “ownership sample” of banks with detailed ownership data and the “full sample” of banks), and the different sample periods (1990s and 1980s).However, the data are not consistent with the prediction that the relationship between performance and leverage may be reversed when leverage is very high due to the agency costs of outside debt.We also find that profit efficiency is responsive to the ownership structure of the firm, consistent with agency theory and our argument that profit efficiency embeds agency costs. The data suggest that large institutional holders have favorable monitoring effects that reduce agency costs, although large individual investors do not. As well, the data are consistent with a non-monotonic relationship between performance and insider ownership, similar to findings in the literature.With respect to the reverse causality from efficiency to capital structure, we offer two competing hypotheses with opposite predictions, and we interpret our tests as determining which hypothesis empirically dominates the other. Under the efficiency-risk hypothesis, the expected high earnings from greater profit efficiency substitute for equity capital in protecting the firm from the expected costs of bankruptcy or financial distress, whereas under the franchise-value hypothesis, firms try to protect the expected income stream from high profit efficiency by holding additional equity capital. Neither hypothesis dominates the other for the ownership sample, but the substitution effect of the efficiency-risk hypothesis dominates for the full sample, suggesting a difference in behavior for the small banks that comprise most of the full sample.The approach developed in this paper can be built upon to test the agency costs hypothesis or other corporate finance hypotheses using data from virtually any industry. Future research could extend the analysis to cover other dimensions of capital structure. Agency theory suggests complex relationships between agency costs and different types of securities. We have analyzed only one dimension of capital structure, the equity capital ratio. Future research could consider other dimensions, such as the use of subordinated notes and debentures, or other individual debt or equity instruments.译文资本结构与企业绩效资料来源: 联邦储备系统理事会作者：Allen N. Berger 在财务和非财务行业，代理成本在公司治理中都是重要的问题。

中英文对照外文翻译(文档含英文原文和中文翻译)The effect of capital structure on profitability : an empirical analysis of listed firms in Ghana IntroductionThe capital structure decision is crucial for any business organization. The decision is important because of the need to maximize returns to various organizational constituencies, and also because of the impact such a decision has on a firm’s ability to deal with its competitive environment. The capital structure of a firm is actually a mix of different securities. In general, a firm can choose among many alternative capital structures. It can issue a large amount of debt or very little debt. It can arrange lease financing, use warrants, issue convertible bonds, sign forward contracts or trade bond swaps. It can issue dozens of distinct securities in countless combinations; however, it attempts to find the particular combination that maximizes its overall market value.A number of theories have been advanced in explaining the capital structure of firms. Despite the theoretical appeal of capital structure, researchers in financial management have not found the optimal capital structure. The best that academics and practitioners have been able to achieve are prescriptions that satisfy short-term goals. For example, the lack of a consensus about what would qualify as optimal capital structure has necessitated the need for this research. A better understanding of the issues at hand requires a look at the concept of capital structure and its effect on firm profitability. This paper examines the relationship between capital structure and profitability of companies listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange during the period 1998-2002. The effect of capital structure on the profitability of listed firms in Ghana is a scientific area that has not yet been explored in Ghanaian finance literature.The paper is organized as follows. The following section gives a review of the extant literature on the subject. The next section describes the data and justifies the choice of the variables used in the analysis. The model used in the analysis is then estimated. The subsequent section presents and discusses the results of the empirical analysis. Finally, the last section summarizes the findings of the research and also concludes the discussion.Literature on capital structureThe relationship between capital structure and firm value has been the subject of considerable debate. Throughout the literature, debate has centered on whether there is an optimal capital structure for an individual firm or whether the proportion of debt usage is irrelevant to the individual firm’s value. The capital structure of a firm concerns the mix of debt and equity the firm uses in its operation. Brealey and Myers (2003) contend that the choice of capital structure is fundamentally a marketing problem. They state that the firm can issue dozens of distinct securities in countless combinations, but it attempts to find the particular combination that maximizes market value. According to Weston and Brigham (1992), the optimal capital structure is the one that maximizes the market value of the firm’s outstanding shares.Fama and French (1998), analyzing the relationship among taxes, financing decisions, and the firm’s value, concluded that the debt does not concede tax b enefits. Besides, the high leverage degree generates agency problems among shareholders and creditors that predict negative relationships between leverage and profitability. Therefore, negative information relating debt and profitability obscures the tax benefit of the debt. Booth et al. (2001) developed a study attempting to relate the capital structure of several companies in countries with extremely different financial markets. They concluded thatthe variables that affect the choice of the capital structure of the companies are similar, in spite of the great differences presented by the financial markets. Besides, they concluded that profitability has an inverse relationship with debt level and size of the firm. Graham (2000) concluded in his work that big and profitable companies present a low debt rate. Mesquita and Lara (2003) found in their study that the relationship between rates of return and debt indicates a negative relationship for long-term financing. However, they found a positive relationship for short-term financing and equity.Hadlock and James (2002) concluded that companies prefer loan (debt) financing because they anticipate a higher return. Taub (1975) also found significant positive coefficients for four measures of profitability in a regression of these measures against debt ratio. Petersen and Rajan (1994) identified the same association, but for industries. Baker (1973), who worked with a simultaneous equations model, and Nerlove (1968) also found the same type of association for industries. Roden and Lewellen (1995) found a significant positive association between profitability and total debt as a percentage of the total buyout-financing package in their study on leveraged buyouts. Champion (1999) suggested that the use of leverage was one way to improve the performance of an organization.In summary, there is no universal theory of the debt-equity choice. Different views have been put forward regarding the financing choice. The present study investigates the effect of capital structure on profitability of listed firms on the GSE.MethodologyThis study sampled all firms that have been listed on the GSE over a five-year period (1998-2002). Twenty-two firms qualified to be included in the study sample. Variables used for the analysis include profitability and leverage ratios. Profitability is operationalized using a commonly used accounting-based measure: the ratio of earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to equity. The leverage ratios used include:. short-term debt to the total capital;. long-term debt to total capital;. total debt to total capital.Firm size and sales growth are also included as control variables.The panel character of the data allows for the use of panel data methodology. Panel data involves the pooling of observations on a cross-section of units over several time periods and provides results that are simply not detectable in pure cross-sections or pure time-series studies. A general model for panel data that allows the researcher to estimate panel data with great flexibility and formulate the differences in the behavior of thecross-section elements is adopted. The relationship between debt and profitability is thus estimated in the following regression models:ROE i,t =β0 +β1SDA i,t +β2SIZE i,t +β3SG i,t + ëi,t (1) ROE i,t=β0 +β1LDA i,t +β2SIZE i,t +β3SG i,t + ëi,t (2) ROE i,t=β0 +β1DA i,t +β2SIZE i,t +β3SG i,t + ëi,t (3)where:. ROE i,t is EBIT divided by equity for firm i in time t;. SDA i,t is short-term debt divided by the total capital for firm i in time t;. LDA i,t is long-term debt divided by the total capital for firm i in time t;. DA i,t is total debt divided by the total capital for firm i in time t;. SIZE i,t is the log of sales for firm i in time t;. SG i,t is sales growth for firm i in time t; and. ëi,t is the error term.Empirical resultsTable I provides a summary of the descriptive statistics of the dependent and independent variables for the sample of firms. This shows the average indicators of variables computed from the financial statements. The return rate measured by return on equity (ROE) reveals an average of 36.94 percent with median 28.4 percent. This picture suggests a good performance during the period under study. The ROE measures the contribution of net income per cedi (local currency) invested by the firms’ stockholders; a measure of the efficiency of the owners’ invested capital. The variable SDA measures the ratio of short-term debt to total capital. The average value of this variable is 0.4876 with median 0.4547. The value 0.4547 indicates that approximately 45 percent of total assets are represented by short-term debts, attesting to the fact that Ghanaian firms largely depend on short-term debt for financing their operations due to the difficulty in accessing long-term credit from financial institutions. Another reason is due to the under-developed nature of the Ghanaian long-term debt market. The ratio of total long-term debt to total assets (LDA) also stands on average at 0.0985. Total debt to total capital ratio(DA) presents a mean of 0.5861. This suggests that about 58 percent of total assets are financed by debt capital. The above position reveals that the companies are financially leveraged with a large percentage of total debt being short-term.Table I.Descriptive statisticsMean SD Minimum Median Maximum━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ROE 0.3694 0.5186 -1.0433 0.2836 3.8300SDA 0.4876 0.2296 0.0934 0.4547 1.1018LDA 0.0985 0.1803 0.0000 0.0186 0.7665DA 0.5861 0.2032 0.2054 0.5571 1.1018SIZE 18.2124 1.6495 14.1875 18.2361 22.0995SG 0.3288 0.3457 20.7500 0.2561 1.3597━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━Regression analysis is used to investigate the relationship between capital structure and profitability measured by ROE. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression results are presented in Table II. The results from the regression models (1), (2), and (3) denote that the independent variables explain the debt ratio determinations of the firms at 68.3, 39.7, and 86.4 percent, respectively. The F-statistics prove the validity of the estimated models. Also, the coefficients are statistically significant in level of confidence of 99 percent.The results in regression (1) reveal a significantly positive relationship between SDA and profitability. This suggests that short-term debt tends to be less expensive, and therefore increasing short-term debt with a relatively low interest rate will lead to an increase in profit levels. The results also show that profitability increases with the control variables (size and sales growth). Regression (2) shows a significantly negative association between LDA and profitability. This implies that an increase in the long-term debt position is associated with a decrease in profitability. This is explained by the fact that long-term debts are relatively more expensive, and therefore employing high proportions of them could lead to low profitability. The results support earlier findings by Miller (1977), Fama and French (1998), Graham (2000) and Booth et al. (2001). Firm size and sales growth are again positively related to profitability.The results from regression (3) indicate a significantly positive association between DA and profitability. The significantly positive regression coefficient for total debt implies that an increase in the debt position is associated with an increase in profitability: thus, the higher the debt, the higher the profitability. Again, this suggests that profitable firms depend more on debt as their main financing option. This supports the findings of Hadlock and James (2002), Petersen and Rajan (1994) and Roden and Lewellen (1995) that profitable firms use more debt. In the Ghanaian case, a high proportion (85 percent)of debt is represented by short-term debt. The results also show positive relationships between the control variables (firm size and sale growth) and profitability.Table II.Regression model results━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━Profitability (EBIT/equity)Ordinary least squares━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━Variable 1 2 3SIZE 0.0038 (0.0000) 0.0500 (0.0000) 0.0411 (0.0000)SG 0.1314 (0.0000) 0.1316 (0.0000) 0.1413 (0.0000)SDA 0.8025 (0.0000)LDA -0.3722(0.0000)DA -0.7609(0.0000)R²0.6825 0.3968 0.8639SE 0.4365 0.4961 0.4735Prob. (F) 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ConclusionsThe capital structure decision is crucial for any business organization. The decision is important because of the need to maximize returns to various organizational constituencies, and also because of the impact such a decision has on an organization’s ability to deal with its competitive environment. This present study evaluated the relationship between capital structure and profitability of listed firms on the GSE during a five-year period (1998-2002). The results revealed significantly positive relation between SDA and ROE, suggesting that profitable firms use more short-term debt to finance their operation. Short-term debt is an important component or source of financing for Ghanaian firms, representing 85 percent of total debt financing. However, the results showed a negative relationship between LDA and ROE. With regard to the relationship between total debt and profitability, the regression results showed a significantly positive association between DA and ROE. This suggests that profitable firms depend more on debt as their main financing option. In the Ghanaian case, a high proportion (85 percent) of the debt is represented in short-term debt.译文加纳上市公司资本结构对盈利能力的实证研究论文简介资本结构决策对于任何商业组织都是至关重要的。

How Important is Financial Risk?IntroductionThe financial crisis of 2008 has brought significant attention to the effects of financial leverage. There is no doubt that the high levels of debt financing by financial institutions and households significantly contributed to the crisis. Indeed, evidence indicates that excessive leverage orchestrated by major global banks (e.g., through the mortgage lending and collateralized debt obligations) and the so-called “shadow banking system” may be the underlying cau se of the recent economic and financial dislocation. Less obvious is the role of financial leverage among nonfinancial firms. To date, problems in the U.S. non-financial sector have been minor compared to the distress in the financial sector despite the seizing of capital markets during the crisis. For example, non-financial bankruptcies have been limited given that the economic decline is the largest since the great depression of the 1930s. In fact, bankruptcy filings of non-financial firms have occurred mostly in U.S. industries (e.g., automotive manufacturing, newspapers, and real estate) that faced fundamental economic pressures prior to the financial crisis. This surprising fact begs the question, “How important is financial risk for non-financial firms?” At the heart of this issue is the uncertainty about the determinants of total firm risk as well as components of firm risk.StudyRecent academic research in both asset pricing and corporate finance has rekindled an interest in analyzing equity price risk. A current strand of the asset pricing literature examines the finding of Campbell et al. (2001) that firm-specific (idiosyncratic) risk has tended to increase over the last 40 years. Other work suggests that idiosyncratic risk may be a priced risk factor (see Goyal and Santa-Clara, 2003, among others). Also related to these studies is work by Pástor and Veronesi (2003) showing how investor uncertainty about firm profitability is an important determinant of idiosyncratic risk and firm value. Other research has examined the role of equity volatility in bond pricing (e.g., Dichev, 1998, Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi, 2008).However, much of the empirical work examining equity price risk takes the risk of assets as given or tries to explain the trend in idiosyncratic risk. In contrast, thispaper takes a different tack in the investigation of equity price risk. First, we seek to understand the determinants of equity price risk at the firm level by considering total risk as the product of risks inherent in the firms operations (i.e., economic or business risks) and risks associated with financing the firms operations (i.e., financial risks). Second, we attempt to assess the relative importance of economic and financial risks and the implications for financial policy.Early research by Modigliani and Miller (1958) suggests that financial policy may be largely irrelevant for firm value because investors can replicate many financial decisions by the firm at a low cost (i.e., via homemade leverage) and well-functioning capital markets should be able to distinguish between financial and economic distress. Nonetheless, financial policies, such as adding debt to the capital structure, can magnify the risk of equity. In contrast, recent research on corporate risk management suggests that firms may also be able to reduce risks and increase value with financial policies such as hedging with financial derivatives. However, this research is often motivated by substantial deadweight costs associated with financial distress or other market imperfections associated with financial leverage. Empirical research provides conflicting accounts of how costly financial distress can be for a typical publicly traded firm.We attempt to directly address the roles of economic and financial risk by examining determinants of total firm risk. In our analysis we utilize a large sample of non-financial firms in the United States. Our goal of identifying the most important determinants of equity price risk (volatility) relies on viewing financial policy as transforming asset volatility into equity volatility via financial leverage. Thus, throughout the paper, we consider financial leverage as the wedge between asset volatility and equity volatility. For example, in a static setting, debt provides financial leverage that magnifies operating cash flow volatility. Because financial policy is determined by owners (and managers), we are careful to examine the effects of firms’ asset and operating characteristics on financial policy. Specifically, we examine a variety of characteristics suggested by previous research and, as clearly as possible, distinguish between those associated with the operations of the company (i.e. factors determining economic risk) and those associated with financing the firm (i.e. factors determining financial risk). We then allow economic risk to be a determinant of financial policy in the structural framework of Leland and Toft (1996), or alternatively,in a reduced form model of financial leverage. An advantage of the structural model approach is that we are able to account for both the possibility of financial and operating implications of some factors (e.g., dividends), as well as the endogenous nature of the bankruptcy decision and financial policy in general.Our proxy for firm risk is the volatility of common stock returns derived from calculating the standard deviation of daily equity returns. Our proxies for economic risk are designed to capture the essential characteristics of the firms’ operations and assets that determine the cash flow generating process for the firm. For example, firm size and age provide measures of line of- business maturity; tangible assets (plant, property, and equipment) serve as a proxy for the ‘hardness’ of a firm’s assets; capital expenditures measure capital intensity as well as growth potential. Operating profitability and operating profit volatility serve as measures of the timeliness and riskiness of cash flows. To understand how financial factors affect firm risk, we examine total debt, debt maturity, dividend payouts, and holdings of cash and short-term investments.The primary result of our analysis is surprising: factors determining economic risk for a typical company explain the vast majority of the variation in equity volatility. Correspondingly, measures of implied financial leverage are much lower than observed debt ratios. Specifically, in our sample covering 1964-2008 average actual net financial (market) leverage is about 1.50 compared to our estimates of between 1.03 and 1.11 (depending on model specification and estimation technique). This suggests that firms may undertake other financial policies to manage financial risk and thus lower effective leverage to nearly negligible levels. These policies might include dynamically adjusting financial variables such as debt levels, debt maturity, or cash holdings (see, for example, Acharya, Almeida, and Campello, 2007). In addition, many firms also utilize explicit financial risk management techniques such as the use of financial derivatives, contractual arrangements with investors (e.g. lines of credit, call provisions in debt contracts, or contingencies in supplier contracts), special purpose vehicles (SPVs), or other alternative risk transfer techniques.The effects of our economic risk factors on equity volatility are generally highly statistically significant, with predicted signs. In addition, the magnitudes of the effects are substantial. We find that volatility of equity decreases with the size and age of the firm. This is intuitive since large and mature firms typically have more stable lines ofbusiness, which should be reflected in the volatility of equity returns. Equity volatility tends to decrease with capital expenditures though the effect is weak. Consistent with the predictions of Pástor and Veronesi (2003), we find that firms with higher profitability and lower profit volatility have lower equity volatility. This suggests that companies with higher and more stable operating cash flows are less likely to go bankrupt, and therefore are potentially less risky. Among economic risk variables, the effects of firm size, profit volatility, and dividend policy on equity volatility stand out. Unlike some previous studies, our careful treatment of the endogeneity of financial policy confirms that leverage increases total firm risk. Otherwise, financial risk factors are not reliably related to total risk.Given the large literature on financial policy, it is no surprise that financial variables are,at least in part, determined by the economic risks firms take. However, some of the specific findings are unexpected. For example, in a simple model of capital structure, dividend payouts should increase financial leverage since they represent an outflow of cash from the firm (i.e., increase net debt). We find that dividends are associated with lower risk. This suggests that paying dividends is not as much a product of financial policy as a characteristic of a firm’s operations(e.g., a mature company with limited growth opportunities). We also estimate how sensitivities to different risk factors have changed over time. Our results indicate that most relations are fairly stable. One exception is firm age which prior to 1983 tends to be positively related to risk and has since been consistently negatively related to risk. This is related to findings by Brown and Kapadia (2007) that recent trends in idiosyncratic risk are related to stock listings by younger and riskier firms.Perhaps the most interesting result from our analysis is that our measures of implied financial leverage have declined over the last 30 years at the same time that measures of equity price risk (such as idiosyncratic risk) appear to have been increasing. In fact, measures of implied financial leverage from our structural model settle near 1.0 (i.e., no leverage) by the end of our sample. There are several possible reasons for this. First, total debt ratios for non-financial firms have declined steadily over the last 30 years, so our measure of implied leverage should also decline. Second, firms have significantly increased cash holdings, so measures of net debt (debt minus cash and short-term investments) have also declined. Third, the composition of publicly traded firms has changed with more risky (especially technology-oriented)firms becoming publicly listed. These firms tend to have less debt in their capital structure. Fourth, as mentioned above, firms can undertake a variety of financial risk management activities. To the extent that these activities have increased over the last few decades, firms will have become less exposed to financial risk factors.We conduct some additional tests to provide a reality check of our results. First, we repeat our analysis with a reduced form model that imposes minimum structural rigidity on our estimation and find very similar results. This indicates that our results are unlikely to be driven by model misspecification. We also compare our results with trends in aggregate debt levels for all U.S. non-financial firms and find evidence consistent with our conclusions. Finally, we look at characteristics of publicly traded non-financial firms that file for bankruptcy around the last three recessions and find evidence suggesting that these firms are increasingly being affected by economic distress as opposed to financial distress.ConclusionIn short, our results suggest that, as a practical matter, residual financial risk is now relatively unimportant for the typical U.S. firm. This raises questions about the level of expected financial distress costs since the probability of financial distress is likely to be lower than commonly thought for most companies. For example, our results suggest that estimates of the level of systematic risk in bond pricing may be biased if they do not take into account the trend in implied financial leverage (e.g., Dichev, 1998). Our results also bring into question the appropriateness of financial models used to estimate default probabilities, since financial policies that may be difficult to observe appear to significantly reduce risk. Lastly, our results imply that the fundamental risks born by shareholders are primarily related to underlying economic risks which should lead to a relatively efficient allocation of capital.Some readers may be tempted to interpret our results as indicating that financial risk does not matter. This is not the proper interpretation. Instead, our results suggest that firms are able to manage financial risk so that the resulting exposure to shareholders is low compared to economic risks. Of course, financial risk is important to firms that choose to take on such risks either through high debt levels or a lack of risk management. In contrast, our study suggests that the typical non-financial firm chooses not to take these risks. In short, gross financial risk may be important, but firms can manage it. This contrasts with fundamental economic and business risks thatare more difficult (or undesirable) to hedge because they represent the mechanism by which the firm earns economic profits.References[1]Shyam,Sunder.Theory Accounting and Control[J].An Innternational Theory on PublishingComPany.2005[2]Ogryezak,W,Ruszeznski,A. Rom Stomchastic Dominance to Mean-Risk Models:Semide-Viations as Risk Measures[J].European Journal of Operational Research.[3] Borowski, D.M., and P.J. Elmer. An Expert System Approach to Financial Analysis: the Case of S&L Bankruptcy [J].Financial Management, Autumn.2004;[4] Casey, C.and N. Bartczak. Using Operating Cash Flow Data to Predict Financial Distress: Some Extensions[J]. Journal of Accounting Research,Spring.2005;[5] John M.Mulvey,HafizeGErkan.Applying CVaR for decentralized risk management of financialcompanies[J].Journal of Banking&Finanee.2006;[6] Altman. Credit Rating:Methodologies,Rationale and Default Risk[M]．Risk Books,London.译文：财务风险的重要性引言2008年的金融危机对金融杠杆的作用产生重大影响。

资本结构与公司绩效：来自约旦的证据最优资本结构的主题一直是许多研究的主题。

有人认为，高盈利的公司不一定比低盈利的公司拥有更高的负债比率。

也有人认为，具有高增长率的企业有较高的债务权益比率。

破产成本（代理公司规模）也被认为是一个重要的影响资本结构因素（Kraus and Litzenberger, 1973; Harris and Raviv, 1991）。

如果这三个因素被认为是资本结构的决定因素，那么这些因素可以用来确定公司绩效。

在实践中，企业经理人都能够找出最佳的资本结构，减少一家公司的融资成本，从而最大限度地提高公司的收入回报。

如果一个公司的资本结构影响公司业绩，那么它是合理的预期，该公司的资本结构会影响公司的健康和其违约的可能性。

从债权人的角度看，它是可能的，银行的债务权益比艾滋病在了解银行的风险管理策略，以及如何确定违约的可能性，陷入财务困境的企业。

总之，对于学者和从业人员来说，资本结构和公司业绩的问题是重要的。

当前文件的目的是研究资本结构对公司业绩在约旦的效果。

有一个缺乏有关资本结构的影响表现在发达国家和发展中国家的企业的经验证据。

在资本结构上以前的证据大多来自企业资产负债率的决定因素。

据作者所知，这项研究提供了第一次尝试探讨约旦的资本结构对公司绩效。

我们之所以选择约旦为例，这一主题是其独特性，我们在下面讨论。

首先，我们的研究期间约旦的经济一直受到中东地区的大量外部冲击。

在1990-1991年爆发了第一次海湾战争。

同时由于这场战争，移民工人和难民回归，增加了在约旦的贫困和失业水平。

例如，在那段时间（世界银行，2003），超过30万人从海湾国家返回约旦。

此外，在约旦河西岸和加沙地带发生的持续不断的冲突，和2003年的第二次海湾战争对约旦的旅游和投资的产生了负面影响。

此外，约旦受到于2000年9月开始的巴勒斯坦起义1的严重影响。

巴勒斯坦起义对大部分出口到这些邻国的约旦公司的公司业绩产生负面影响。

本科毕业论文（设计）外文翻译原文：Capital Structure and Debt StructureIn this study, we provide a number of new insights into capital structure decisions by recognizing that firms simultaneously use different types, sources, and priorities of debt. These insights are based on a novel data set that records the type, source, and priority of every balance sheet debt instrument for a large sample of rated public firms. The data are collected directly from financial footnotes in firms’ annual 10-K filings and supplemented with information on pricing and covenants from three origination based datasets: Reuters LPC’s Dealscan, Mergent’s Fixed Income Securities Database, and Thomson’s SDC Platinum. To our knowledge, this data set is one of the most comprehensive sources of information on the debt structure of a sample of public firms: It contains the detailed composition of the stock of corporate debt on the balance sheet, which goes far beyond what is available from origination-based datasets alone.We begin by showing the importance of recognizing debt heterogeneity in capital structure studies. We classify debt into bank debt, straight bond debt, convertible bond debt, program debt (such as commercial paper), mortgage debt, and all other debt. For almost 70% of firm-year observations in our sample, balance sheet debt comprises significant amounts of at least two of these types. Even more striking is the fact that 25% of the observations in our sample experience no significant one-year change in their total debt but significantly adjust the underlying composition of their debt. Studies that treat corporate debt as uniform have ignored this heterogeneity, presumably in the interest of building more tractable theory models or due to a previous lack of data.In this section, we motivate our empirical analysis of the relation between debt structure and credit quality by examining hypotheses from the theoretical literature ondebt composition and priority.The first group of theories hypothesizes that firms should move from bank debt to non-bank debt as credit quality improves (Diamond, 1991; Chemmamur and Fulghieri, 1994; Boot and Thakor, 1997;Bolton and Freixas, 2000). The seminal article is Diamond’s (1991b) model of reputation acquisition. In his model, firms graduate from bank debt to arm’s length debt by establishing a reputation for high earnings. More specifically, the main variable that generates cross-sectional predictions is the ex-ante probability that a firm is a bad type with a bad project; this ex-ante probability is updated over periods based on earnings performance, and is interpreted as a credit rating. Bad firms have a lower history of earnings, and a higher probability of selecting a bad project in the future. High quality firms borrow directly from arm’s length l enders and avoid additional costs of bank debt associated with monitoring,medium-quality firms borrow from banks that provide incentives from monitoring, and the lowest qualityfirms are rationed.The model by Bolton and Freixas (2000) explores the optimal mix of bonds, bank debt, and equity. The key distinction between bonds and bank debt is the monitoring ability of banks. If current returns are low and default is pending, banks can investigate the borrower’s future profitability, whereas bond holders alwa ys liquidate the borrower. In their model, high quality firms do not value the ability of banks to investigate, and therefore rely primarily on arm’s length debt. Lower quality borrowers value theability to investigate by the bank, and thus rely more heavily on bank financing.Two main hypotheses emerge from this kind of model. First, the lender with monitoring duties (the bank) should be the most senior in the capital structure. The intuition is as follows: a bank’s incentive to monitor is maximized when the bank appropriates the full return from its monitoring effort. In the presence of senior or pari passu non-monitoring lenders, the bank is forced to share the return to monitoring with other creditors, which reduces the bank’s incentive to monitor.Second, the presence of junior non-bank creditors enhances the senior bank’s incentive tomonitor. This result follows from the somewhat counterintuitive argument that a bank has astrongerincentive to monitor if its claim is smaller. Park (2000) describes this intuition as follows: if the project continues, an impaired senior lender will get less than a sole lender simply because his claim is smaller. On the other hand, if the project is liquidated, an impaired senior lender will get the same amount as a sole lender, the liquidation value. Given its lower value in the going concern, a bank with a smaller claim actually has a stronger incentive to monitor and liquidate the firm. The presence of junior debt reduces the size of the bank’s claim, which increases the a mount of socially beneficial monitoring.The intuition of this latter result is evident if one considers a bank creditor with a claim that represents a very large fraction of the borrower’s capital structure. In such a situation, the bank has less of an incentive to liquidate a risky borrower, given that the bank’s large claim benefits relatively more from risk-taking than a smaller claim. In other words, a large bank claim is more “equity-like” than a small bank claim given its upside potential. As a result, reducing the size of the senior bank claim by adding junior debt improves the banks’ incentive to detect risk-shifting. Alternatively, by holding a small stake in the firm, bank lenders are able to credibly threaten borrowers with liquidation, which makes their monitoring more powerful in reducing managerial value-decreasing behavior.There are at least two ways, however, in which the existing theories do not map into our empirical design. First, theories such as Diamond (1993), Besanko and Kanatas (1993), and Park (2000) derive a priority structure as the optimal contract under incentive conflicts, but they do not explicitly derive the comparative static of how optimal priority structure should vary across a continuum of incentive conflict severity. A thought experiment close to this is provided by DeMarzo and Fishman (2007), who do examine the comparative statics of debt structure with respect to liquidation values,managerial patience, and managerial private benefits. However, their predictions are about the mix between long-term debt and lines of credit, rather than priority structure per se.Second, with the exception of DeMarzo and Fishman (2007) and some other recent dynamic contracting work, these theories are static in nature, and therefore donot predict how debt structure should change with respect to the evolution of stochastic cash flows. In this sense, the theory is more relevant for our random sample cross-sectional results more than our panel results on fallen angels.Indeed, Diamond (1993), Besanko and Kanatas (1993), and Park (2000) are ex-ante models in which moral hazard explains the existence of priority structure; however, they do not consider dynamic deterioration in the firm’s credit quality. In DeMarzo and Fishman (2007), agents draw down on credit lines when cash flows are insufficient to pay debt coupons. However, there are no dynamic models to our knowledge that derive both an increase in secured and subordinated debt as a percentage of total debt, i.e. the spreading of the debt structure that we find as credit quality deteriorates.Figure 1 presents our first main result on the relation between credit quality and debt structure:firms lower in the credit quality distribution spread the priority structure of their debt obligations. While investment grade firms rely uniquely on senior unsecured debt and equity, speculative grade firms rely on a combination of secured bank debt, senior unsecured debt, subordinated convertibles and bonds, and equity.Table 4 presents estimates of these patterns in a regression context. In Panel A, the left hand side variables are the debt priority class amounts scaled by total debt. The omitted credit quality group is firms rated A or better. As the coefficients show, speculative grade firms have a much higher fraction of their debt in secured and subordinated obligations. The magnitude is economically significant: secured and subordinated debt as a fraction of total debt is more than 50% higher for firms with a B rating than for firms with a rating of A or better.In Panel B, the left hand side variable for each regression is the debt priority class amount scaled by total capitalization.: lower credit quality firms use a substantially higher fraction of secured and subordinated debt in their capital structure. Once again, the magnitudes are striking: the combination of secured and subordinated debt as a fraction of total capital structure is higher by more than 40% for B-rated firms compared to firms rated A or higher. Meanwhile, senior unsecured debt actuallydecreases in the capital structure despite the fact that total debt increases. Naturally the decrease in senior unsecured is smaller when scaled by total capitalization than by total debt. This reflects the fact that lower credit quality firms use more total debt and less equity. In other words, as firms move down the credit quality distribution, they replace senior unsecured debt and equity with secured bank debt and subordinated debt. This finding is also evident in Panel A of Figure in the introduction.Using a novel data set on the debt structure of a large sample of rated public firms, we show that debt heterogeneity is a first order aspect of firm capital structure. The majority of firms in our sample simultaneously use bank and non-bank debt, and we show that a unique focus on leverage ratios misses important variation in security issuance decisions. Furthermore, cross-sectional correlations between traditional determinants of capital structure (such as profitability) and different debt types are heterogeneous. These findings suggest that an understanding of corporate capital structure necessitates an understanding of how and why firms use multiple types, sources, and priorities of corporate debt.We then examine debt structure across the credit quality distribution. We show that firms of lower credit quality have substantially more spreading in their priority structure, using a multi-tiered debt structure often consisting of both secured and subordinated debt issues. We corroborate these results in a separately collected dataset for firms that experience a drop in credit quality from investment grade to speculative grade. Here too, firms spread their priority structure as they worsen in credit quality. The spreading of the capital structure as credit quality deteriorates is therefore both a cross-sectional and within-firm phenomenon. The increased secured debt used by lower quality firms is generally secured bank debt, whereas the increased subordinated debt is in the form of bonds and convertibles.The spreading of the capital structure as credit quality deteriorates is broadly consistent with models such as Park (2000) that view the existence of priority structure as the optimal solution to manager-creditor incentive problems. However, to our knowledge, the existing models do not exactly deliver the dynamics that we find. For example, they do not derive differential priority structures as a function of acontinuum of either moral hazard severity or creditor quality types. Further, these models do not explain why non-bank issues after a firm is downgraded must be subordinated to existing non-bank debt or convertible to equity. Theoretical research suggests that the use of convertibles can mitigate risk shifting by making the security’s value less sensitiv e to the volatility of cash flows (Brennan and Schwartz, 1988) or by overcoming the asymmetric information problem in equity issuance (Stein, 1992).Future research could aim to integrate these ideas about convertible debt into a conceptual framework that links debt structure and capital structure.We close by highlighting two other avenues for future research. First, our findings suggest that recognition of debt heterogeneity might prove useful in examining the effect of financing on invest mentor the importance of adjustment costs in capital structure studies. Indeed, we have shown that firms frequently adjust their debt structure even when total debt remains relatively stable. This latter fact suggests that adjustment costs are not as large as an examination of total debt implies. An important question related to the adjustment cost literature is whether firms have debt composition targets, and if so how that effects the literature’s estimates of the speed of adjustment to targets. To address this question would require a longer panel of data than we have available in our sample.Second, we hypothesize that our findings with regard to fallen angels may help explain the difference between bank and non-bank debt recovery rates in bankruptcy (Hamilton and Carty, 1999;Carey and Gordy, 2007). According to Standard & Poor’s, bank debt recovery rates are 75% whereas senior unsecured bonds recover only 37%. Our findings suggest that one can perhaps trace the bank debt recovery premium to the moment when firms move from investment grade to speculative grade debt ratings. It is at this point that banks become secured and increase the use of control-oriented covenants,both of which are likely to increase recovery rates in the event of bankruptcy.Source: Joshua D. Rauh，Amir Sufi，2010，“Capital Structure and Debt Structure”. Review of Financial Studies,vol.23,no.12, December.PP.4242-4280译文：资本结构和债务结构在这个研究中，我们提供大量的资本结构决策的新见解,认识到公司同时使用不同的债务类型、来源和优先债务。

外文文献翻译译文原文：Capital Structure around the World: The Roles of FirmandCountry-Specific DeterminantsWe analyze the importance of firm-specific and country-specific factors in the leverage choice of firms from 42 countries around the world. Our analysis yields two new results. First, we find that firm-specific determinants of leverage differ across countries, while prior studies implicitly assume equal impact of firm-specific factors. Second, although we concur with the conventional direct impact of country-specific factors on the capital structure of firms, we show that there is an indirect impact because country-specific factors also influence the roles of firm-specific determinants of leverage.Prior research (e.g. Demirgüç-Kuntand Maksimovic, 1999; Booth, Demirgüç-Kunt andMaksimovic, 2001; Claessens, Djankov and Nenova, 2001; Bancel and Mittoo, 2004) finds thata firm’s capital structure is not only influenced by firm-specific factors but also by country specificfactors. In this study, we demonstrate that country-specific factors can affect corporateleverage in two ways. On the one hand, these factors can influence leverage directly. Forexample, a more developed bond market facilitating issue and trading of public bonds may leadto the use of higher leverage in a country, while a developed stock market has theoppositeeffect. On the other hand, we show that country-specific factors can also influence corporateleverage indirectly through their impact on firm-specific factors’ roles. For example, althoughthe dev eloped bond market of a country stimulates the use of debt, the role of asset tangibility ascollateral in borrowing will be rather limited for firms in the same country. In other words,country-characteristics may explain why in one country a firm’s tangibi lity affects leverage, butnot in another country. Previous studies have not systematically investigated these indirecteffects.International studies comparing differences in the capital structure between countriesstarted to appear only during the last decade. An early investigation of seven advancedindustrialized countries is performed by Rajan and Zingales (1995). They argue that althoughcommon firm-specific factors significantly influence the capital structure of firms acrosscountries, several country-specific factors also play an important role. Demirgüç-Kunt andMaksimovic (1999) compare capital structure of firms from 19 developed countries and 11developing countries. They find that institutional differences between developed and developingcountries explain a large portion of the variation in the use of long-term debt. They also observethat some institutional factors in developing countries influence the leverage of large and smallfirms differently. Several recent studies on the field have indicated that even amongdevelopedeconomies like the U.S. and European countries, the financing policies and managers’ behaviorare influenced by the institutional environment and international operations (see, for example, Graham and Harvey, 2001; Bancel and Mittoo, 2004; and Brounen, De Jong and Koedijk,2006).The literature specifically discusses only the direct impact of country characteristics onleverage. In an analysis of ten developing countries, Booth et al. (2001) find that capitalstructure decisions of firms in these countries are affected by the same firm-specific factors as indeveloped countries. However, they find that there are differences in the way leverage isaffected by country-specific factors such as GDP growth and capital market development. Theyconclude that more research needs to be done to understand the impact of institutional factors onfirms’ capital structure choices. The importance of country-specific factors in determining crosscountrycapital structure choice of firms is also acknowledged by Fan et al. (2006) who analyzea larger sample of 39 countries. They find a significant impact of a few additional country-specificfactors such as the degree of development in the banking sector, and equity and bondmarkets. In another study of 30 OECD countries, Song and Philippatos (2004) report that mostcross-sectional variation in international capital structure is caused by the heterogeneity of firm-,industry-, and country-specific determinants. However, they do notfind evidence to support theimportance of cross-country legal institutional differences in affecting corporate leverage.Giannetti (2003) argues that the failure to find a significant impact of country-specific variablesmay be due to the bias induced in many studies by including only large listed companies. Sheanalyzes a large sample of unlisted firms from eight European countries and finds a significantinfluence on the leverage of individual firms of a few institutional variables such as creditorprotection, stock market development and legal enforcement. Similarly, Hall et al. (2004) analyze a large sample of unlisted firms from eight European countries. They observe crosscountryvariation in the determinants of capital structure and suggest that this variation could bedue to different country-specific variables.A remarkable feature of existing studies on international capital structure is the implicitassumption that the impact of firm-specific factors on leverage is equal across countries (see forexample Booth et al., 2001; Giannetti, 2003; Song and Philippatos, 2004; and Fan et al., 2006). By reporting the estimated coefficients for firm-specificdeterminants of leverage per country, these papers, on the one hand, acknowledge that theimpact of firm-level determinants does differ in terms of signs, magnitudes and significancelevels. On the other hand, in the analysis of country-specific determinants of corporateleverage,these papers also make use of country dummies in pooled firm-year regressions, thus forcing thefirm-specific coefficients to have the same value. With an extremely large number of firm-yearobservations, it is more likely for this procedure to produce statistically significant results formany country-specific variables. But, utilizing an alternative regression framework where asingle average capital structure for each country is used as an observation, one hardly findsstrong evidence on this issue. As an additional contribution of our paper, we show the invalidity of this implicit assumption. Our analysis without imposing such restriction thus provides a more reliable analysis on theimportance of country-specific variables.The study encompasses a large number of countries (42 in total) from every continent forthe period 1997-2001. We construct a database of nearly 12,000 firms (about 60,000 firm-yearobservations). All types of firms –large and small – are included as long as a reasonable amountof data is available. We analyze the standard firm-specific determinants of leverage like firmsize, asset tangibility, profitability, firm risk and growth opportunities. Besides, we incorporate alarge number of country-specific variables in our analysis, including legal enforcement,shareholder/creditor right protection, market/bank-based financial system, stock/bond marketdevelopment and growth rate in a country’s gross domestic product (GDP).Firm-specific and country-specific determinants are the two major types of variables thatwe take into account when analyzing the impacts on firms’ leverage choice.The firms in our sample cover 42 countries that are equally divided between developedand developing countries. Data for leverage and firm-specific variables are collected fromCOMPUSTAT Global database. We exclude financial firms and utilities. Data on country-specificvariables are collected from a variety of sources, mainly World Development Indicatorsfiles and Financial Structure Database of the World Bank. Few country-specific variables aretaken from previous studies including La Porta et al. (1998), Claessens and Klapper (2002) andBerkowitz et al. (2003).Our sample period covers the years 1997-2001. The selection of a time-period involves atrade-off between the number of countries that can be included in the study and the availabilityof enough firm-specific data. Whenever needed, we resort to some other sources to collect anymissing data. It is still impossible to obtain data for each and every variable from all 42countries during this time period. The final sample consists of 59,225 observations on 11,845firms. Even though we aim to keep the number of countries high enough and also maintain a reasonable number of firms, our dataset has unavoidably a limited number of firms in a fewcountries.Analyzing the direct impact of country-specific factors on leverage, the evidencesuggests that creditor right protection, bond market development,and GDP growth rate have asignificant influence on corporate capital structure. In measuring the impact indirectly, we findevidence for the importance of legal enforcement, creditor/shareholder right protection, andmacro-economic measures such as capital formation and GDP growth rate. It implies that incountries with a better legal environment and more stable and healthier economic conditions, firms are not only likely to take more debt, but also the effects of firm-level determinants of leverageare also reinforced. Overall, the evidence provided here highlights the importance of country-specificfactors in corporate capital structure decisions. Our conclusion is that country-specificfactors do matter in determining and affecting the leverage choice around the world, and it isuseful to take into account these factors in the analysis of a country’s capital structure. If thelimitations of data, especially the number of countries, can be overcome, one might find evenmore significant results with respect to the impact of country-specificfactors.We first make a detailed comparative analysis of the impact of various firm-specificfactors. We find across a large number of countries that the impact of some factors liketangibility, firm size, risk, and profitability and growth opportunities is strong and consistent withstandard capital structure theories. Our study shows that, in terms of firm-specific determinantsof leverage, capital structure theories doexplain the corporate leverage choice in a large numberof countries. Using a model with several firm-specific explanatory variables, we find a relativelylarge explanatory power of leverage regressions in most countries. However, a few determinantsremain insignificant, and in some countries one or two coefficients are significant with anunexpected sign. Performing a simple statistical test, we reject the hypothesis that firm-specificcoefficients across countries are equal. It indicates that the often-made implicit assumption ofequal firm-level determinants of leverage across countries does not hold.In the analysis of the direct impact of country-specific factors, we observe that certainfactors like GDP growth rate, bond market development and creditor rightprotectionsignificantly explain the variation in capital structure across countries. Moreover, we findconsiderable explanatory power of country-specific variables beyond firm-specific factors. Wethen proceed to measure the indirect impact of country-specific variables. The resultsconsistently show the importance of country factors as we document significant effects of thesevia firm-specific determinants. For example, we observe that in countries with a better lawenforcement system and a more healthy economy, firms are not only likely to take more debt,but the effects of some firm-level determinants of leverage such as growth opportunities,profitability and liquidity are also reinforced. Our findings indicate that theconventionaltheories on capitalstructure developed using listed firms in the United States as a role model,work well in similar economies with developed legal environment and high level of economicdevelopment. The indirect impact analysis also indicates that firm-specific variables aresignificantly influenced by several country-specific variables but in different ways.Capital structure theories have been mostly developed and tested in the single-countrycontext. Researchers have identified several firm-specific determinants of a firm’s leverage,based on the three most accepted theoretical models of capital structure, i.e. the static trade-offtheory, the agency theory and the pecking-order theory. A large number of studies have beenconducted to date investigating to what extent these factors influence capital structures of firmsoperating within a specific country. In this paper, we examine the role of firm-specificdeterminants of corporate leverage choice around the world. We analyze a large sample of 42countries, divided equally between developed and developing countries. Our main objective isto verify the role of various country-specific factors in determining corporate capital structure.We distinguish two types of effects: the direct effect on leverage and the indirect effect throughthe influence on firm-specific determinants of corporate leverage.We find that the impact of several firm-specific factors liketangibility, firm size, risk,growth and profitability on cross-country capital structure is significant and consistent with theprediction of conventional capital structure theories. On the other hand, we also observe that ineach country one or more firm-specific factors are not significantly related to leverage. Forsome countries, we find results that are inconsistent with theoretical predictions.Several studies analyzing international capital structure assume cross-country equality offirm-level determinants. We show that this assumption is unfounded. Rather, it is necessary toconduct an analysis of country-specific factors by including countries as observations and avoida specification using a pooled regression method. We conduct regressions using country-specificfactors to explain coefficients of country dummies as well as firm-specificdeterminants.Source:Abede Jong, RezaulK abir, 2007.9 “Capital Structure around the World: The Roles of FirmandCountry-Specific Determinants”. ERIM Report Series Reach in Management.September.pp.58-63.译文：世界各地的资本结构：公司和国家因素在其中的影响我们从世界42个国家中分析了公司在选择财务杠杆所需要考虑的公司特有因素和国家因素的重要性。

最优资本结构的概念最优资本结构（Optimal Capital Structure）是指企业在最大化股东财富的同时，根据自身特点和市场环境选择最适合的债务和股权比例，以达到最佳的财务稳定和成本效益。

一个企业的资本结构由债务和股权的比例组成，债务资本包括短期债务和长期债务，股权资本包括普通股和优先股。

企业的资本结构对其经营和发展有着重要的影响。

在资本结构中，债务资本代表了企业的债务风险，股权资本则代表了企业的所有者权益。

不同的资本结构对企业的风险承受能力、财务稳定性、税收效益和成本控制等方面都会产生不同的影响。

确定最优资本结构需要考虑以下几个关键因素：1.成本：债务资本一般来说比股权资本的成本要低，因为债权人通常会要求付出固定的利息，而股权投资者则根据企业的业绩来获得回报。

因此，通过增加债务比例，企业可以降低资金成本，提高其盈利能力。

2.税收：利息支出是可以在企业税前利润中扣除的，而股权投资的股息分红则没有这个优势。

因此，通过债务融资可以减少企业税负，提高税后利润。

3.风险：债务融资会增加企业的债务风险，如果企业经营不佳或市场变化，可能无法偿还债务，导致企业资不抵债。

相比之下，股权融资则不会对企业的经营产生直接影响，但股权投资者要求对企业的控制权，从而减少了经营自由度。

4.财务灵活性：债务融资可以提供企业更多的财务灵活性，因为企业可以根据经营状况决定是否偿还债务或提前偿还。

相比之下，股权融资通常是较为固定的，投资者在企业的所有股权份额不会随着企业的经营状况发生变化。

5.市场反应：不同的投资者对企业的资本结构可能有不同的看法和反应。

一些投资者更喜欢股权融资，因为它代表了对潜在的增长机会和利润的参与；而一些投资者则更倾向于债务融资，因为它更安全和稳定。

因此，企业的资本结构可能会影响其在市场上的声誉和股价。

为了确定最佳的资本结构，企业需要综合考虑上述因素，并进行定量和定性的分析。

这包括评估企业的财务状况、预测未来的现金流量、考虑不同的经济和市场条件等。

┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊装┊┊┊┊┊订┊┊┊┊┊线┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊Evaluating A Company's Capital StructureFor stock investors that favor companies with good fundamentals, a "strong" balance sheet is an important consideration for investing in a company's stock. The strength of a company' balance sheet can be evaluated by three broad categories of investment-quality measurements: working capital adequacy, asset performance and capital structure. In this article, we'll look at evaluating balance sheet strength based on the composition of a company's capital structure.A company's capitalization (not to be confused with market capitalization) describes the composition of a company's permanent or long-term capital, which consists of a combination of debt and equity. A healthy proportion of equity capital, as opposed to debt capital, in a company's capital structure is an indication of financial fitness.Clarifying Capital Structure Related TerminologyThe equity part of the debt-equity relationship is the easiest to define. In a company's capital structure, equity consists of a company's common and preferred stock plus retained earnings, which are summed up in the shareholders' equity account on a balance sheet. This invested capital and debt, generally of the long-term variety, comprises a company's capitalization, i.e. a permanent type of funding to support a company's growth and related assets.A discussion of debt is less straightforward. Investment literature often equates a company's debt with its liabilities. Investors should understand that there is a difference between operational and debt liabilities - it is the latter that forms the debt component of a company's capitalization - but that's not the end of the debt story.Among financial analysts and investment research services, there is no universal agreement as to what constitutes a debt liability. For many analysts, the debt component in a company's capitalization is simply a balance sheet's long-term debt. This definition is too simplistic. Investors should stick to a stricter interpretation of debt where the debt component of a company's capitalization should consist of the following: short-term borrowings (notes payable), the current portion of long-term debt, long-term debt, two-thirds (rule of thumb) of the principal amount of operating leases and redeemable preferred stock. Using a comprehensive total debt figure is a prudent analytical tool for stock investors.It's worth noting here that both international and U.S. financial accounting standards boards are proposing rule changes that would treat operating leases and pension "projected-benefits" as balance sheet liabilities. The new proposed rules certainly alert investors to the true nature of these off-balance sheet obligations that have all the earmarks of debt. (To read more on liabilities, see Off-Balance-Sheet Entities: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and Uncovering Hidden Debt.)┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊装┊┊┊┊┊订┊┊┊┊┊线┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊Is there an optimal debt-equity relationship?In financial terms, debt is a good example of the proverbial two-edged sword. Astute use of leverage (debt) increases the amount of financial resources available to a company for growth and expansion. The assumption is that management can earn more on borrowed funds than it pays in interest expense and fees on these funds. However, as successful as this formula may seem, it does require that a company maintain a solid record of complying with its various borrowing commitments. (For more stories on company debt loads, see When Companies Borrow Money, Spotting Disaster and Don't Get Burned by the Burn Rate.)A company considered too highly leveraged (too much debt versus equity) may find its freedom of action restricted by its creditors and/or may have its profitability hurt as a result of paying high interest costs. Of course, the worst-case scenario would be having trouble meeting operating and debt liabilities during periods of adverse economic conditions. Lastly, a company in a highly competitive business, if hobbled by high debt, may find its competitors taking advantage of its problems to grab more market share.Unfortunately, there is no magic proportion of debt that a company can take on. The debt-equity relationship varies according to industries involved, a company's line of business and its stage of development. However, because investors are better off putting their money into companies with strong balance sheets, common sense tells us that these companies should have, generally speaking, lower debt and higher equity levels.Capital Ratios and IndicatorsIn general, analysts use three different ratios to assess the financial strength of a company's capitalization structure. The first two, the so-called debt and debt/equity ratios, are popular measurements; however, it's the capitalization ratio that delivers the key insights to evaluating a company's capital position.The debt ratio compares total liabilities to total assets. Obviously, more of the former means less equity and, therefore, indicates a more leveraged position. The problem with this measurement is that it is too broad in scope, which, as a consequence, gives equal weight to operational and debt liabilities. The same criticism can be applied to the debt/equity ratio, which compares total liabilities to total shareholders' equity. Current and non-current operational liabilities, particularly the latter, represent obligations that will be with the company forever. Also, unlike debt, there are no fixed payments of principal or interest attached to operational liabilities.The capitalization ratio (total debt/total capitalization) compares the debt component of a company's capital structure (the sum of obligations categorized as debt + total shareholders' equity) to the equity component. Expressed as a percentage, a low number is indicative of a healthy equity cushion, which is always more desirable than a high┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊装┊┊┊┊┊订┊┊┊┊┊线┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊percentage of debt. (To continue reading about ratios, see Debt Reckoning.) Additional Evaluative Debt-Equity ConsiderationsCompanies in an aggressive acquisition mode can rack up a large amount of purchased goodwill in their balance sheets. Investors need to be alert to the impact of intangibles on the equity component of a company's capitalization. A material amount of intangible assets need to be considered carefully for its potential negative effect as a deduction (or impairment) of equity, which, as a consequence, will adversely affect the capitalization ratio. (For more insight, read Can You Count On Goodwill? and The Hidden Value Of Intangibles.)Funded debt is the technical term applied to the portion of a company's long-term debt that is made up of bonds and other similar long-term, fixed-maturity types of borrowings. No matter how problematic a company's financial condition may be, the holders of these obligations cannot demand payment as long the company pays the interest on its funded debt. In contrast, bank debt is usually subject to acceleration clauses and/or covenants that allow the lender to call its loan. From the investor's perspective, the greater the percentage of funded debt to total debt disclosed in the debt note in the notes to financial statements, the better. Funded debt gives a company more wiggle room. (To read more on financial statement footnotes, see Footnotes: Start Reading The Fine Print.)Lastly, credit ratings are formal risk evaluations by credit-rating agencies - Moody's, Standard & Poor's, Duff & Phelps and Fitch – of a company's ability to repay principal and interest on debt obligations, principally bonds and commercial paper. Here again, this information should appear in the footnotes. Obviously, investors should be glad to see high-quality rankings on the debt of companies they are considering as investment opportunities and be wary of the reverse.ConclusionA company's reasonable, proportional use of debt and equity to support its assets is a key indicator of balance sheet strength. A healthy capital structure that reflects a low level of debt and a corresponding high level of equity is a very positive sign of investment quality.To continue learning about financial statements, read What You Need To Know About Financial Statements and Advanced Financial Statement Analysis.一个公司的资本结构评价┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊装┊┊┊┊┊订┊┊┊┊┊线┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊┊对于股票投资者来说，具有良好的基本面支持的公司，一个好的资产负债表是对投资一家公司的股票的一个重要的考虑因素。

On Capital Structure and Maximum Enterprise ValueAbstract:The different arrangement of capital structure may exert direct influence on capital cost and the discount rate of the net flow of the future cash,finally giving impact on enterprise value and the optimization of property right structure.We should strengthen the effective restraint of debt to managers and make full use of the signal transmission function of enterprise capital structure to realize the optimization of capital structure and to promote the value increasing.Key words: enterprise value; Capital structure; company administrative structure. signal transmission function1.The relationship between the capital structure and enterprise value maximizationCapital structure refers to the enterprise all kinds of capital composition and proportion relationship. Theory of capital structure has some areas of controversy , summed up in the following three perspectives : The first is their own capital structure theory, the capital is only an idea is defined as the rights and interests capital source, namely the equity capital of the internal relationship between each component, truthfully to collect capital, capital reserve, the proportion of the relationship between retained earnings, this view is not common. The second view is long term capital structure theory, the idea that capital refers to the long-term capital of the enterprise, namely the equity capital and long-term debt capital. Short-term debt as working capital to deal with, do not belong to the category of capital structure research. The third kind of view is that all the capital structure theory, studies the enterprise all constitute the proportion of the capital structure of the relationships, relative to the second view, it includes not only the long-term capital (equity and debt capital) for a long time, will also be short-term debt capital is also included. Capital structure optimization is to point to through to the enterprise capital structure adjustment, make its capital structure tends to rationalization, to achieve the target process. Modern capital structure theory, capital structure optimization goal is tomaximize the enterprise value. The optimal capital structure should be at the lowest weighted average cost of capital is to make the enterprise the financing risk for maximum and minimum return on investment, so as to realize the enterprise value maximization of a kind of capital structure. At any time, the enterprise is the only capital structure, but at this moment if not the optimal capital structure, capital structure is the largest enterprise value has not come at this time. Only under the condition of the optimal capital structure, enterprise will achieve maximum value.Enterprise value is refers to the enterprise investor is expected from the enterprise to obtain the present value of future cash flows. The essence of which is the efficiency of the enterprise comprehensive embodiment. Capital structure refers to the enterprise the source of all kinds of long-term capital composition and proportion relationship, it is a main factor of the decision enterprise the overall cost of capital, and reflect the main measure of firm's financial risk. Different capital structure, will directly affect the cost of capital, and affect the discount rate of future cash flows discounted, impact on the enterprise value. The cost of capital is due to the use of enterprises and raise the cost of capital, is a long-term investment and enterprise assets remuneration obtained the basic return rate. Different will lead to the weighted average cost of capital structure is different, resulting in the different enterprise financing efficiency, and affect the long-term investment project and the benefit of the enterprise overall level and, in turn, affect the enterprise value. Liabilities have financial leverage effect, the expected return on assets is greater than the cost of borrowing rate under the premise of borrowing will increase earnings per share surplus, but at the same time because of the expected rate of return on assets is not stability, will lead to a surplus of volatility and increase the probability of bankruptcy, and causing financial risk. Different capital structure will lead to enterprise financial risk degree of difference and scientific capital structure policy should not only use financial leverage to increase surplus per share, also want to avoid debt brought about by the financial risk, in order to avoid the due cannot pay his debts and the enterprise bankruptcy, so that the loss of the enterprise value. Belong to the stakeholders in capital ownership, capital structure reflects the composition of the property. Under the modern enterprise system, property rightstructure is reasonable, involves which lead to the agency relationship is reasonable, and affect the enterprise production and operation mechanism is reasonable, for the enterprise can form an effective motivation mechanism, to promote the enterprise in a market economy cycle is crucial.Theoretical and empirical studies on the relationship between capital structure and value companies are more abundant. According to its history, can be on the relationship between capital structure and enterprise value research conclusion is summarized as follows:First, the capital structure is designed to achieve a specific form of corporate value and achieve ways to optimize the capital structure and financing decisions and increase the value of the company 's management is an important way . Corporate capital structure reasonable arrangement , one can take advantage of tax effect liabilities , reduce capital costs , improve capital efficiency, on the other hand you can optimize the company 's governance structure, reduce the potential cause greater risk among those within the company conflicts of interest costs and improve value creation -based implementation. In addition , Ross (1977) signaling theory suggests that managers of financing choices actually send signals to investors , corporate investors will share issue seen as a signal enterprise asset quality deterioration , while debt financing is good asset quality signal , so the enterprise value of a positive correlation with asset-liability ratio , the more high -quality companies , the higher the debt ratio . Debt to enterprise value has a positive correlation , play an active role in the enterprise.Second, the capital structure of the debt ratio is not as high as possible . Financial risks to improve the company's capital structure with gradual increases in the debt ratio , increased debt possibility of future cash flows is less than the expected value , which may result in bankruptcy costs , resulting in no less than the value of the company before the level of debt financing .Third, there is an optimal capital structure. When the debt continue to rise, bringing the marginal benefit and marginal risk balance, the enterprise value reaches the maximum capital structure is the optimal capital structure. Thus, in the company's capital structure decisions , in order to increase shareholder wealth,require the company has a high debt ratio ; But from the perspective of financial risk and creditors , the company's debt ratio will have a limit. Visible, capital structure decision problem is an optimization problem , that is, under certain financial risks and maximize the value of shareholders' creditors limit the company's wealth . Since the choice of capital structure but also by a variety of different factors , different industries, different enterprises and different periods of the same enterprise , and its optimal capital structure may be different.Our research methods on the theory of capital structure and corporate value diversity , conclusions are not consistent , the findings also have some different foreign . This was mainly caused by a number of factors, such as different levels of economic development , different levels of development of capital markets , as well as different cultures, legal environment and industry characteristics , etc. . Performance in China, due to the unique transition economy differs from the developed market economies of Western insiders control problems and underdeveloped capital markets, market manager , control of the market , making the company's capital structure decision is not based on considerations of maximizing the value of listed companies . As China's listed companies financing order in a certain period showed inconsistent with the financing order theory of the phenomenon , and its order of equity financing , short-term debt financing , long-term debt financing and internal financing .2.To set up the target capital structure factors should be consideredIn theory, any enterprise should exist the best capital structure. But, in practice, the enterprise is difficult to accurately determine the best point, needs to be studied in a careful analysis based on the factors that affect the enterprise capital structure optimization, to optimize the capital structure decision.(1) The economic cycle. Under the condition of market economy, any country's economic development in waves. Generally speaking, in a recession and depression stage, due to the objective economic recession, the majority of business is struggling, often troubled financial situation, or even worse. To this, enterprises should as far as possible compression in debt. In the economic recovery and prosperity stage, in general, because of the economic trough, market supply and demand rise, mostenterprises should according to the need to rapidly expand, does not give up in order to keep the cost of capital minimum good development opportunities.(2) The enterprise debt paying ability. Through to the enterprise original Indices such as current ratio, quick ratio, asset-liability ratio analysis, evaluating the debt paying ability of the enterprise. If the enterprise debt paying ability is quite strong, can increase the ratio of debt in capital structure properly, in order to give full play to financial leverage, the enterprise to increase profits. On the contrary, should not be excessive debt, and should be taken to issue stock and other equity capitalThe financing way.(3) The attitude held by the owners and operators. Attitude held by the owners and operators, including the owner and operator control of the enterprise and the attitude to risk, to a large extent determines the enterprise's capital structure. If don't want to lose control of the enterprise, owner and operator should choose debt financing. In addition, for more conservative and cautious, owner and operator of future economic pessimism, preference as far as possible the use of equity capital, debt ratio is relatively small; To dare to take risks, to economic development prospects are optimistic, and rich in the spirit of enterprise owners and operators, tend to use more debt financing, give full play to financial leverage.(4) The market competition environment. Even in the same enterprise of macroeconomic environment, because of their different market environment, its debt levels also should not treat as the same. If the enterprise industry competition degree is weak or in a monopoly position, sales will not happen problem, stable profit growth, can be appropriately increase the debt ratio; On the contrary, if the enterprise industry competition is stronger, due to its sales completely determined by the market, so should not be too much debt ways to raise money.(5) Enterprise profitability. If the enterprise's development and the management is extensive, will lead to lower corporate profitability, it is difficult to profitability through retained earnings or other capital to raise money, had to raise debt, this inevitably leads to more debt in the capital structure, this kind of enterprise financial risk should be paid attention to; For profitability strong enterprises, take the equity capital financing is relatively easy, this kind of enterprise financing channels andmeans of choice is bigger, can raise the funds required for the production development, can make low comprehensive cost of capital as much as possible.(6) The development degree of capital market. Capital market is a place for companies to raise capital, the perfect and development degree of the capital market, will to some extent, restricted enterprise's financing behavior and capital structure. For a long time, the indirect financing in the capital market in China accounts for absolute position, slow development of the securities market, a single cause enterprise financing way, heavy debt, with the deepening of financial reform in our country, the stock market will more and more important in national economy.3. Unreasonable capital structure, the influence on the enterprise value maximization3.1 The reason of unreasonable capital structure:3.1.1 The general reasonThe capital structure of listed companies in our country exists above the status duo, investigate its reason, mainly due to the special national conditions of our country. Our country is in economic transition period, namely in the planned economy to market economy transition period, we have their own special economic environment and economic operation characteristics. The securities market of our country is in such cases, and is driven by the government. The government is the original purpose of setting up a stock market for state-owned enterprises in trouble, help state-owned enterprises free from debt problems. So most of the listed company of our country is formed by the state-owned enterprise restructuring.3.1.2 The specific reasons(1) Imperfect capital market development. First of all, our country stock market the seller exists serious insufficient competition. Stock market of our country, the primary goal for the state-owned enterprises is in trouble, in order to achieve this goal, for quite a long time, the government listed companies to issue shares to planning, strong administrative system, the deeds of the strict quota control, and leaning to state-owned enterprises, makes our country of the seller of the stock market exists serious insufficient competition, and made many sub prime even inferior company is listed, the price of the stock due to limited supply, the price levelis generally high. Second, the imbalance in the structure of enterprise bond market development. The stock market and bond market rapid development and expanded sharply at the same time, the development of the enterprise bond market has not been due. Their own lack of issuing bonds. Fact between soft constraints in credit and equity markets are imperfect constraint mechanism to make enterprises always put bonds, the last of the financing order. Relevant state policy to a certain extent, to curb the development of corporate bond market. Due to the lagged development of enterprise bond market in China, hindered the conditional corporate bond issue, is not conducive to enterprise by raising the proportion of debt financing to establish reasonable financing structure.(2) The non-standard market operation mechanism. Equity financing is a kind of investors, financiers and market intermediary tripartite participation behavior. Corporate financing behavior if it fails to meet the basic requirement of capital optimization configuration, why in the stock market can freely be implemented? At the end of the day, the market operation mechanism of non-standard is the source of the listed companies malicious behavior encircling money outside. Because the market mechanism is not standard, makes the financiers are compliance through market investment behavior to give the profits of investors and intermediaries compliance and source of income.(3) Equity structure defects. China's capital market is one of the most important feature is the equity division, formed the state shares, legal person share, tradable shares and foreign shares a few fragmented markets to each other. The market, make the different between different shareholders interests demand, led to the actual control or major shareholders independent goes against the other shareholders standard of value pursuit, they do not necessarily put all focus on how to improve company's performance, because of rising corporate profits, the improvement of the financial indicators, through leverage reflects on the asset price negotiable, show the negotiable stock prices rise, so as to benefit the tradable shares directly. In China, the controlling shareholder in general are tradable shareholders, the shareholders didn't get the corresponding because of rising asset prices benefits, this is the institutional defects of inconsistency of value target.3.2 The unreasonable capital structure influence on the enterprise value maximization:3.2.1 The unreasonable capital structure leads to poor corporate governance structureThe capital structure influence the cost of capital not only, still affect shareholders, creditors and the agent that the distribution of residual claims and control of the enterprise, ultimately affect the efficiency of corporate governance, and corporate value. Different capital structure, enterprise's equity constitute different governance structure model is different, embodies the relationship of different stakeholders. Corporate governance is the enterprise operation mechanism of internal decision. Corporate governance is to improve the operating mechanism mainly reflected in the enterprise is effective. Corporate governance is a relationship of checks and balances, but its core lies in the effective operation of governance mechanism. And the key to the efficiency of enterprise operation mechanism at the operator's ability, motivation and binding is advantageous to the enterprise market value to improve the management decisions. Therefore, to perfect the corporate governance is the assurance of enterprise value maximization., from the viewpoint of the capital structure of our state-owned enterprises and state holding corporation governance structure, the prominent problem is that state-owned equity ratio is too high, the enterprise in different degree, subject to the government's administrative intervention, weaken the efficiency of production and operation of enterprises; Youngling of state-owned enterprise property rights, on the other hand, led to the decision-making and control of the substance to the excessive concentration of the enterprise operator, to form the enterprise "insider control" phenomenon, to make the operator or the autonomy in operation of the production cost is too expensive. Oneness property right structure caused the state-owned enterprise incentive and constraint mechanism is relatively weak, reduce the efficiency of the enterprise should have, limits the enterprise value maximization goal.3.2.2 High agency cost caused by unreasonable capital structureCorporate debt directly have a certain influence on agent's actions and decisions, which affect the market value of the enterprise. At present, our country there is adominant state-owned shares of listed companies, the owner absence, insider control, constraints, and poor incentive mechanism were the problem. Internal equity of listed companies in China the average ratio of 0.11% (0.074% stake of the members of the board, senior managers hold 0.036%), compared to 11.48% of the us internal shareholding proportion, nearly 100 times the gap. Chairman and chief executive of the listed companies in China with greater decision-making power to the company, is a has benefits at the expense of the interests of the shareholders, especially when the company's chairman and chief executive, taken by the same person, the situation is more serious. Shareholders of the company due to the existence of the above issues, the lack of effective monitoring, managers of the listed companies of constraint mechanism is not sound, insider control is quite serious. Serious insider control inevitably leads to the company's action more reflect the will of the managers, not the shareholders or owners will eventually. Thanks to debt financing will increase pressure on managers, and force it to work hard to avoid bankruptcy, managers from their own interests, will give up debt financing, choose equity financing. Equity constraint is relatively soft, however, high stake of capital structure can cause lack of supervision over corporate managers, corporate managers work hard pressure is insufficient, the final damage or the interests of the shareholders and creditors. And these are largely leads to agency costs increase and the decrease of the enterprise value.3.2.3 The signal transfer function of the capital structure of the failed to effectively useCapital structure as the solution to the problem of excessive investment and inadequate investment tools, cases, established in the investment capital structure can also be used as the transfer signal of corporate insiders private information. First that agent to change the capital structure ratio directly affect the investor to the enterprise value evaluation, that is, make the enterprise market value changes of variation of debt ratio. Investors have higher debt levels as a high quality of the signal, when enterprises to raise the debt, suggests that managers expected enterprise have a better business performance. And when the enterprise operating performance is low, have high marginal cost of enterprise bankruptcy wouldn't imitate increased more in highperformance of corporate debt. Second, in the valley and parr's model, assuming that the enterprise managers understand the investment income distribution function, and outside investors don't understand. Manager is a risk averse, and that the benefit of the enterprise management is market traders ownership share a function, so the higher the manager's stake, whereby the sending the signal, the better, the more likely it is to attract investors, and is beneficial to reduce the degree of information asymmetry, bring good benefits expected, increasing the market value of the enterprise. Most of China's enterprises are not good at using the signal transfer function to give useful information to the outside world, corporate executives stake is not much, and each year the amount of shares held by the little change, this will make investors lack of enterprise value judgment basis.3. optimize capital structure to promote the enterprise value maximizationCompanies need to be carried out in accordance with the enterprise value maximization goal of capital structure adjustment and optimization, the goal is to reshape the game interest subjects, to change the power and strategy space, in the hope of game equilibrium is Pareto improvement, concrete from the following several aspects.(1) improve enterprise ownership control structures, improve the internal governance structureCapital structure, corporate governance and corporate value is interlinked, enterprise value is the goal of financial management, capital structure is the foundation of the enterprise value maximization, and corporate governance is the company's steady operation and the guarantee of the enterprise value maximization. Modern corporate finance theory analysis shows that realize the goal of the company must improve the corporate governance mechanism, by optimizing the capital structure to improve corporate governance this purpose.Effective corporate governance structure is advantageous to the formation of the constraint by the relationship between the interests of all parties and incentive mechanism, to ensure the interests of all stakeholders, to maximize the enterprise value. The formation of the corporate governance structure and design, and is closely related to enterprise's capital structure. First of all, as a result of the configuration ofequity capital the basic motivations of the ownership of the control of enterprises, the rights and interests of different capital structure will affect the control of the enterprise, the influence on enterprise control goal and the principal goal of deviation degree, which leads to different enterprise efficiency; Second, the use of funds to creditors and creditors of creditor's rights and the maintenance of security measures to influence the level of agency costs, will affect the enterprise value. Therefore, the rights and interests of the enterprise capital structure is the basis of the formation of enterprise control, the composition of equity capital and debt capital is the root of shareholders and creditors' interest contradictions. The optimization of capital structure, must want to establish a reasonable proportion of corporate equity structure and forms the enterprise to seek to maximize the enterprise value of the agency relationship as the goal. To enhance the efficiency of China's enterprises to form in pursuit of the enterprise, make the enterprise value maximize governance structure, we must improve the structure of property right configuration of company governance, and strengthen the creditor as well.(2) Strengthen the debts of the business operators of effective constraintCapital structure not only reflects the business capital of different sources, it also affect the relations between the distribution of corporate power in various stakeholders, determines the restraint and incentive intensity of different interest subjects. Therefore, the efficiency of the capital structure to entrust - agent can play a role. In modern companies especially the listed company equity dispersion, by moderate debt will reduce the free-riding problem in a minority shareholder in the supervision of enterprises, to solve the problem of equity constraint is lax and insider control, etc. In addition debt will make manager to distribute free cash flow in a timely manner to investors rather than their profligacy, debt will also forced managers to sell non-performing assets and restrict manager is invalid but can increase the investment of power. When the debtor is unable to repay debts or enterprises need financing, the creditor will be investigating corporate balance sheets according to the debt contract, thus will enable the enterprise to reveal information about and supervision of the manager and make better. Reasonable capital structure can play an effective inhibition, excite the work enthusiasms of business operators,and constraints of the business operators, behavior, and can play a good governance effect, promote the enterprise value growth.(3) Establish a mechanism for dynamic optimization of capital structureAll enterprises to participate in market competition constantly seek ways to access to competitive advantage, but because of the incomplete information in the realistic economy, uncertainty and bounded rationality, makes it impossible for people to consider all the factors that affect the capital structure, grasp the "objective" unable to advance the law of economic activity, thus make the "optimal" capital structure decision. The capital structure decision not only is a necessary condition of maximizing the enterprise value, more important is the enterprise to constantly adjust the capital structure, to implement the strategy of the corresponding external competition. Enterprise products market is in constant change, due to the rapid changes in technology and market, enterprises face the environment full of uncertainty, enterprise's capital structure decision is not a choice question in advance, but in a complex and uncertain environment constantly searching, constantly adjust process. If companies ignore product market environment changes, stressed or focus on the so-called "optimal capital structure", may be lost of continuous competitive advantage.According to the situation of our country fully consider various factors, reasonable determine the best proportion of capital structure, and the best proportion of the capital structure is a dynamic rather than static. This requires our country enterprise in the financial management must be combined with the specific situation of the industry and your business, try to improve their capital structure of enterprise, also is in the whole capital of enterprise, how to determine the proportion of equity capital and debt capital, capital to make enterprise evenly weighted minimum, enterprises maximize shareholder wealth. For the management of the capital structure shall establish financial early warning system, take the corresponding strategies to adapt to the changes in the environment at the same time. In choosing financing tools, can use convertible preferred shares, redeemable preferred stock, convertible bonds and callable bonds have better elasticity financing tools, such as flexibility of capital structure.。

外文翻译原文The analysis of company's capital and evaluation of factors, which influencecreation of the optimal capital structureMaterial Source: Author: Svetlana Saksonova This is the primary information gathering stage, which is necessary for the effective planning afterwards. At this stage the objective of the financial manager is to determine the existing tendencies of the development of capital structure, as well as its volume, and their influence on the financial stability of the company. Efficiency of the existing financing arrangements can also be considered at this stage. This stage can conditionally be split into three parts –one more concerned with qualitative characteristics and the two other ones concerned with quantifying the results of the analysis.The first (qualitative) stage involves comparing the dynamics of the total capital and its ingredients compared to the dynamics of production and sales, assessing the proportion of the borrowed and equity and the history of this proportion. Borrowed capital is further split into long-term and short-term financial obligations, overdue financial obligations are discovered (if they exist) and the causes for the inabilities of a company to meet financial commitments are analyzed.The second (more quantitative) stage of the analysis uses the system of coefficients of financial stability of a company to asses the capital structure.This stage utilizes well known financial indicators, such as different liquidity ratios.The purpose of these coefficients of financial stability is to show the degree of the possible risk of bankruptcy of a company that is related to the use of borrowed financial resources. Obviously, if the company does not use any borrowed funds the risk of bankruptcy related to the usage of borrowed funds is equal to zero. As the proportion of the borrowed capital grows, the risk of bankruptcy is also growing, because of the increase in company’s liabilities.Therefore, financial coefficients are mostly of interest for the existing andpotential creditors of the company.As a rule, debts to the ordinary creditors are paid, after the payment of taxes, wages and repayment of claims of secured creditors, who provided loans secured by collateral, such as office space or production machinery. The assessment of company’s liquidity helps to make a judgment of the extent to which the ordinary (unsecured) creditor is protected.Another group of financial coefficients helps to determine the dependency of the company on the borrowed capital (how does the company use financial leverage) and therefore to compare the positions of the creditors and owners of the company. The concept of financial leverage states that the successful use of the borrowed capital leads to the increased profits for the owners of the company, since they have the rights to profits obtained by the use of the borrowed capital, which leads to the increase in company’s equity.However, one has to keep in mind that any loans and interest on those loans have to be repaid even in case, if the profits obtained are not enough to cover these payments. The owners of the company always have to cover the claims of the creditors, which can negatively influence the equity of the company. The concept of leverage is therefore a double-edged sword. The positive and negative influence of the financial leverage grows in proportion to the volume of the borrowed capital that the company uses. The risk of the creditor, therefore, also grows in tandem with the risk of the owners. The coefficients in this group include:• Debt to assets ratio is the primary and the most utilized evaluation, which can be made, while evaluating the risk of the creditor. This indicator is calculated by the following formula:Debt to assets ratio = Total Liabilities / Total AssetsThis indicator is calculated for a point in time, but not for a period. It calculates the share of the “other money” in the total amount of claims on the assets of the company. The higher this coefficient, the larger is the probable risk for the creditor. Let us assume, for example, that the results of the computation for the last three years of business operation of Company X are presented (along with several other financial coefficients that will be discussed below) in Table 1.This data indicates that around 50 % of the financial resources at company’s disposal come from the borrowed resources. Naturally, a question arises: whether this is a positive or negative development? This question doesnot have a unanimous answer. Everything depends on the preferences of company’s owners and its management, most importantly, on their attitude to risk. Managers, who are risk averse, will try to achieve lower levels of this indicator and will attempt attracting additional finance by issuing new shares. One the other hand, managers and owners who are risk neutral and have higher tolerance for risk, will attempt to boost the share of borrowed funds in assets, aiming to exploit the positive aspects of financial leverage and increase profits.If a company has a well-developed and positive credit history, creditors will gladly lend money, in spite of the large value of the debt to asset ratio. In practice, this indicator can reach levels as high as 90 %.I f the company is not considered a “reliable borrower” (not necessarily due to a failure to repay obligations, but, for example, due to the fact that the company is newly created), then the debt to asset ratio of 50 % can be considered critical for the company, in a sense, that after that level, the prospective of obtaining additional loan financing is significantly decreased.However, one cannot simply conclude that the coefficient described above is a perfectly correct evaluation of the company’s abilities to repay its debts. The reason for this is that the asset book value (used to calculate the coefficient) does not always correspond to the real economic value of those assets or even the value, for which they can be sold quickly. Apart from that, this coefficient does not provide any insights on the possible changes in profits of the company, which can influence the payments of interest and the repayment of the principal. • Debt to capital ratio is an indicator that is computed based on the proportion between the size of the long-term debt and the size of the capital. This indicator presents the analyst witha clearer picture of risk due to the usage of borrowed funds. In this calculation, capital is defined as the total amount of company’s capital (includi ng common and preferred stock as well as long-term debt), minus the short term liabilities. The coefficient can be computed according to the following formula:Debts to capital ratio = Long-term Liabilities /Total capitalBy definition, capital in this case includes the amount of long-term claims on company’s assets by the creditors as well as the owners but does not include current (short-term) claims. The total amount of those corresponds to what can be called net assets”, if no adjustments have been mad e, such as excluding deferred taxes from the calculation. For example, if deferred taxes have notbeen excluded a calculation of this indicator for the company leads to the results that are summarized in the second line of Table 1.Debt to capital ratio tends to get lower over time, due to the fact that part of the long-term financial liabilities is usually repaid over time. This coefficient gets a large share of attention, because a lot of contracts on lending, whether it’s the private company or a public corporation being financed, contain certain conditions that regulate the maximum share of company’s borrowed capital, which is expressed in terms of the debt to capital ratio.The same characteristics, but in a different ratio, are represented by the indicator of the debt to equity ratio. This indicator is directly related to the previous indicator and can be calculated, with the help of the previous indicator. Consider the following calculation:Let D be the amount of the long-term debt in the company, E – the size of company‘s equity, then DC –debt to capital ratio can be calculated by the following formula:DC = D / (D+E).If we now let, DE to denote debt to equity ratio, such as DE = D/E, then by simple algebraic manipulation, we obtain that:DE = DC / (1 – DC).The value of the debt to equity ratio for Company X is also summarized in Table 1.Using this indicator, one can easily interpret the condition of capital structure. A potential creditor, for example, can clearly see that on January 1st, 2005, company X long term debts are around 22 % of the size of the equity. If the company X has sufficiently high liquidity (that is the ability to repay its short term obligations), then it can be granted additional credit. Note, that if one only had the access to the first ratio considered (debt to assets ratio), it would not have been possible to make that conclusion, because there long-term debtswere not separated from the short-term ones.A number of other ratios can be considered, for example, the previous calculation of the debt to equity ratio can be modified to include current liabilities (short term debts) divided by the total equity of the company. This coefficient represents a yet another way to indicate relative shares in claims of creditors and owners and is also used to determine the dependency of the company on borrowed capital.If the values of this coefficient are significantly higher than the values of the previously described coefficients, then there’s a large share of the short term liabilities in the overall capital structure.Another possible coefficient used in financial ratio analysis is capital to asset ratio, which indicates the share of company’s equity in its assets. The existence of such a variety of coefficients serves to underscore how carefully the rules of financial analysis and conditions that regulate credit access are developed. However, coefficients only serve to provide the first overall idea of the risks and rewards that stem from the usage of the borrowed capital.On the third (also quantitatively oriented) stage of the analysis, the objective of the analyst is to assess the efficiency of capital utilization as a whole, as well as the efficiency of utilizing separate sources of capital. This stage also envisages a set of useful quantitative indicators, which can be calculated and analyzed. These indicators can include:• Capital intensity of production. This indicator aims to show the amount of capital necessary to produce one unit of firm’s output. It is mostly dependent on the natur e of firm’s output (for example, clothes vs. electronics manufacturing). Information about capital intensity is vital for planning firm’s capital requirements in the future.• Capital turnover period.This coefficient is the number of days, in which the company turns over capital that is capital, generates the projected amount of profit. This coefficient can be computed for equity, borrowed capital as well as the total capital of the company. Since every turnover of capital means generating a certain amount of profit, the lower the company manages to make capital turnover period, the more efficient is capital utilization.• Return on equity. This indicator characterizes the amount of earnings generated by a single unit of equity and is one of the most important pieces of information, necessary for decisions on optimizing capital structure.• Return on investment (total capital).This indicator is somewhat equivalent。

优化资本结构：思考经济和其他价值---资本结构外文文献翻译西安工业大学北方信息工程学院毕业设计论文外文翻译资料系别管理信息系专业财务管理班级 B080510 姓名郭静学号 B08051019导师王化中Optimal Capital Structure: Reflections oneconomic and other valuesBy Marc Schauten & Jaap Spronk11. IntroductionDespite a vast literature on the capital structure of the firm see Harris and Raviv, 1991, Graham and Harvey, 2001, Brav et al., 2005, for overviews there still is a big gap between theory and practice see e.g. Cools, 1993, Tempelaar, 1991, Boot & Cools, 1997. Starting with the seminal work by Modigliani & Miller 1958, 1963, much attention has been paid to the optimality of capital structure from the shareholders’ point of view Over the last few decades studies have been produced on the effect of other stakeholders’ inte rests on capital structure. Well-knownexamples are the interests of customers who receive product or service guarantees from the company see e.g. Grinblatt & Titman, 2002. Another area that has received considerable attention is the relationbetween managerial incentives and capital structure Ibid.. Furthermore, the issueof corporate control2 see Jensen & Ruback, 1983 and, related, the issue of corporate governance3 see Shleifer & Vishney, 1997, receive a lion’s part of the more recent academic attentio n for capital structure decisions From all these studies, one thing is clear: The capital structure decision or rather, the management of the capital structure over time involves more issues than the imization of the firm’s market value alone. In this paper,we give an overview of the different objectives and considerations that have been proposed in the literature. We make a distinction between two broadly defined situations. The first is the traditional case of the firm that strives for the imization of the value of the shares for the current shareholders. Whenever other considerations than value imization enter capital structure decisions, these considerations have to be instrumental to the goal of value imization. The second case concerns the firm that explicitly chooses for more objectives than valueimization alone. This may be because the shareholders adopt a multiple stakeholders approach or because of a different ownership structure than the usual corporate structure dominating finance literature. An example of the latter is the co-operation, a legal entity which can be found in a.o. many European countries. For a discussion on why firms are facing multiple goals, we refer to Hallerbach and Spronk 2002a, 2002b In Section 2 we will describe objectives and considerations that, directlyor indirectly, clearly help to create and maintain a capital structure which is 'optimal'for the value imizing firm. The third section describes other objectives and considerations. Some of these may have a clear negative effect on economic value, others may be neutral and in some cases the effect on economic value is not always completely clear. Section 4 shows how, for both cases, capital structure decisions can be framed as multiple criteria decision problems which can then benefit from multiple criteria decision support tools that are now widely available2. imizing shareholder valueAccording to the neoclassical view on the role of the firm, the firm has one single objective: imization of shareholder value. Shareholders possess the property rights of the firm and are thus entitled to decide what the firm should aim for. Since shareholders only have one objective in mind - wealth imization - the goal of the firm is imization of the firm's contribution to the financial wealth of its shareholders. Thefirm can accomplish this by investing in projects with positive net present value4. Part of shareholder value is determined by the corporate financing decision5. Two theories about the capital structure of thefirm - the trade-off theory and the pecking order theory - assume shareholder wealth imization as the one and only corporate objective. We will discuss both theories including several market value related extensions. Based on this discussion we formulate a list of criteriathat is relevant for the corporate financing decision in thisessentially neoclassical viewThe original proposition I of Miller and Modigliani 1958 states that in aperfect capital market the equilibrium market value of a firm is independent of its capital structure, i.e. the debt-equity ratio6. If proposition I does not hold then arbitrage will take place. Investors will buy shares of the undervalued firm and sell shares of the overvalued shares in such a way that identical income streams are obtained. As investors exploit these arbitrage opportunities, the price of the overvalued shares will fall and that of the undervalued shares will rise, until both prices are equalWhen corporate taxes are introduced, proposition I changes dramatically. Miller and Modigliani 1958, 1963 show that in a world with corporate tax the value of firms is a.o. a function of leverage. When interest payments become tax deductible and payments to shareholders are not, the capital structure that imizes firm value involves a hundred percent debt financing. By increasing leverage, the payments to the government are reduced with a higher cash flow for the providers of capital as a result. Thedifference between the present value of the taxes paid by an unlevered firm Gu and an identical levered firm Gl is the present value of tax shields PVTS. Figure 1 depicts the total value of an unlevered and a levered firm7. The higher leverage, the lower Gl, the higher Gu - Gl PVTSIn the traditional trade-off models of optimal capital structure it is assumed that firms balance the marginal present value of interest taxshields8 against marginal direct costs of financial distress or direct bankruptcy costs.9 Additional factors can be included in this trade-off framework. Other costs than direct costs of financial distress are agency costs of debt Jensen & Meckling, 1976. Often cited examples of agency costs of debt are the underinvestment problem Myers, 197710, the asset substitution problem Jensen & Meckling, 1976 and Galai & Masulis, 1976, the 'play for time' game by managers, the 'unexpected increase of leverage combined with an equivalent pay out to stockholders to make to increase the impact', the 'refusal to contribute equity capital' and the 'cash in and run' game Brealey, Myers & Allan, 2006. These problems are caused by the difference of interest between equity and debt holders and could be seen as part of the indirect costs of financial distress. Another benefit of debt is the reduction of agency costs between managers and external equity Jensen and Meckling, 1976, Jensen, 1986, 1989. Jensen en Meckling 1976 argue that debt, by allowing larger managerial residual claims because the need for external equity is reduced by the use of debt, increases managerial effort to work. In addition, Jensen 1986 argues that high leverage reduces free cash with less resources to waste on unprofitable investments as a result.11 The agency costs between management and external equity are often left out the trade-off theory since it assumes managers not acting on behalf of the shareholders only which is an assumption of the traditional trade-off theoryIn Myers' 1984 and Myers and Majluf's 1984 pecking ordermodel12 there is no optimal capital structure. Instead, because of asymmetric information andsignalling problems associated with external financing13, firm's financing policies follow a hierarchy, with a preference for internal over external finance, and for debt over equity. A strict interpretation of this model suggests that firms do not aim at a target debt ratio. Instead, the debt ratio is just the cumulative result of hierarchical financing over time. See Shyum-Sunder & Myers, 1999. Original examples of signalling models are the models of Ross 1977 and Leland and Pyle 1977. Ross 1977 suggests that higher financial leverage can be used by managers to signal an optimistic future for the firm and that these signals cannot be mimicked by unsuccessful firms14. Leland and Pyle 1977 focus on owners instead of managers. They assume that entrepreneurs have better information on the expected cash flows than outsiders have. The inside information held by an entrepreneur can be transferred to suppliers of capital because it is in the owner's interest to invest a greater fraction of his wealth in successful projects. Thus the owner's willingness to invest in his own projects can serve as a signal of project quality. The value of the firm increases with the percentage of equity held by the entrepreneur relative to the percentage he would have held in case of a lower quality project. Copeland, Weston & Shastri, 2005.The stakeholder theory formulated by Grinblatt & Titman 200215 suggests that the way in which a firm and its non-financial stakeholders interact is an important determinant of the firm's optimal capital structure. Non-financial stakeholders are those parties other than the debt and equity holders. Non-financial stakeholders include firm's customers, employees, suppliers and the overall community in which the firm operates. These stakeholders can be hurt by a firm's financial difficulties. For example customers may receive inferior products that are difficult to service, suppliers may lose business, employees may lose jobs and the economy can be disrupted. Because of the costs they potentially bear in the event of a firm's financial distress, non-financial stakeholders will be less interested ceteris paribus in doing business with a firm having a higher potential for financialdifficulties. This understandable reluctance to do business with a distressed firm creates a cost that can deter a firm from undertaking excessive debt financing even when lenders are willing to provide it on favorable terms Ibid., p. 598. These considerations by non-financial stakeholders are the cause of their importance as determinant for the capital structure. This stakeholder theory could be seen as part of the trade-off theory see Brealey, Myers and Allen, 2006, p.481, although the term 'stakeholder theory' is not mentioned since these stakeholders influence the indirect costs of financial distress.16 As the trade-off theory excluding agency costs between managers and shareholders and the pecking order theory, the stakeholder theory of Grinblatt and Titman2002 assumes shareholder wealth imization as the single corporate objective.17Based on these theories, a huge number of empirical studies have been produced. See e.g. Harris & Raviv 1991 for a systematic overview of this literature18. More recent studies are e.g. Shyum-Sunder & Myers 1999, testing the trade-off theory against the pecking order theory, Kemsley & Nissim 2002 estimating the present value of tax shield, Andrade & Kaplan 1998 estimating the costs of financial distress and Rajan & Zingales 1995 investigating the determinants of capitalstructure in the G-7 countries. Rajan & Zingales 199519 explain differences in leverage of individual firms with firm characteristics. In their study leverage is a function of tangibility of assets, market to book ratio, firm size and profitability. Barclay & Smith 1995 provide an empirical examination of the determinants of corporate debt maturity. Graham & Harvey 2001 survey 392 CFOs about a.o. capital structure. We come back to this Graham & Harvey study in Section 3.20Cross sectional studies as by Titman and Wessels 1988, Rajan & Zingales 1995 and Barclay & Smith 1995 and Wald 1999 model capital structure mainly in terms of leverage and then leverage as a function of different firm and market characteristics as suggested by capital structure theory21. We do the opposite. We do not analyze the effect of several firm characteristics on capital structure c.q. leverage, but we analyze the effect of capital structure on variables that co-determine shareholder value. In several decisions, including capital structuredecisions, these variables may get the role of decision criteria. Criteria which are related to the trade-off and pecking order theory are listed in Table 1. We will discuss these criteria in more detail in section 4. Figure 2 illustrates the basic idea of our approach 3. Other objectives and considerationsA lot of evidence suggests that managers act not only in theinterest of the shareholders see Myers, 2001. Neither the static trade-off theory nor the pecking order theory can fully explain differences in capital structure. Myers 2001, p.82 states that 'Yet even 40 years after the Modigliani and Miller research, our understanding of these firms22 financing choices is limited.' Results of several surveys see Cools 1993, Graham & Harvey, 2001, Brounen et al., 2004 reveal that CFOs do not pay a lot of attention to variables relevant in these shareholder wealth imizing theories. Given the results of empirical research, this does not come as a surpriseThe survey by Graham and Harvey finds only moderate evidence for the trade-off theory. Around 70% have a flexible target or a somewhat tight target or range. Only 10% have a strict target ratio.Around 20% of the firms declare not to have an optimal or targetdebt-equity ratio at allIn general, the corporate tax advantage seems only moderately important in capital structure decisions. The tax advantage of debt is most important for large regulated and dividend paying firms. Further, favorable foreign tax treatment relative to the US is fairlyimportant in issuing foreign debt decisions23. Little evidence is found that personal taxes influence the capital structure24. In general potential costs of financial distress seem not very important although credit ratings are. According to Graham and Harvey this last finding could be viewed as an indirect indication of concern with distress. Earnings volatility also seems to be a determinant of leverage, which is consistent with the prediction that firms reduce leverage when the probability of bankruptcy is high. Firms do not declare directly that the present value of the expected costs of financial distress are an important determinant of capital structure, although indirect evidence seems to exist. Graham and Harvey find little evidence that firms discipline managers by increasing leverage. Graham and Harvey explicitly note that ‘1 managers might be unwilling to admit to using debt in this manner, or 2 perhaps a low rating on this question reflects an unwillingness of firms to adopt Jensen’s solution more than a weakness in Jensen’s argument'The most i mportant issue affecting corporate debt decisions is management’s desire for financial flexibility excess cash or preservation of debt capacity. Furthermore, managers are reluctant to issue common stock when they perceive the market is undervalued most CFOs think their shares are undervalued. Because asymmetric information variables have no power to predict the issue of new debt or equity, Harvey and Graham conclude that the pecking order model is not the true model of the security choice25Thefact that neoclassical models do not fully explain financialbehavior could be explained in several ways. First, it could be that managers do strive for creating shareholder value but at the same time also pay attention to variables other than the variables listed in Table 1. Variables of which managers think that they are justifiably or not relevant for creating shareholder value. Second, it could be that managersdo not only serve the interest of the shareholders but of other stakeholders as well26. As a result, managers integrate variables that are relevant for them and or other stakeholders in the process of managing the firm's capital structure. The impact of these variables on the financing decision is not per definition negative for shareholder value. For exampl e if ‘value of financial rewards for managers’ is one the goals that is imized by managers ? which may not be excluded ? andif the rewards of managers consists of a large fraction of call options, managers could decide to increase leverage and pay out an excess amount of cash, if any to lever the volatility of the shares with an increasein the value of the options as a result. The increase of leverage could have a positive effect on shareholder wealth e.g. the agency costs between equity and management could be lower but the criterion 'value of financial rewards' could but does not have to be leading. Third, shareholders themselves do possibly have other goals than shareholder wealth creation alone. Fourth, managers rely on certain different rules of thumb or heuristics that donot harm shareholder value but can not be explained by neoclassical models either27. Fifth, the neoclassical models are not complete or not tested correctly see e.g. Shyum-Sunder & Myers, 1999 Either way, we do expect variables other than those founded in the neoclassical property rights view are or should be included explicitly in the financing decision framework. To determine which variables should be included we probably need other views or theories of the firm than the neoclassical alone. Zingales 2000 argues that ‘…corporate finance theory, empirical research, practical implications, and policy recommendations are deeply rooted in an underlying theory of the firm.’ Ibid., p. 1623. Examples of attempts of new theories are 'the stakeholder theory of the firm' see e.g. Donaldson and Preston, 1995, 'the enlightened stakeholder theory' as a response see Jensen, 2001, 'the organizational theory' see Myers, 1993, 2000, 2001 and the stakeholder equity model see Soppe, 2006Weintroduce an organizational balance sheet which is based on the organizational theory of Myers 1993. The intention is to offer a framework to enhance a discussion about criteria that could be relevant for the different stakeholders of the firm. In Myers' organizational theoryemployees。

Capital Structure and Firm Performance1. IntroductionAgency costs represent important problems in corporate governance in both financial and nonfinancial industries. The separation of ownership and control in a professionally managed firm may result in managers exerting insufficient work effort, indulging in perquisites, choosing inputs or outputs that suit their own preferences, or otherwise failing to maximize firm value. In effect, the agency costs of outside ownership equal the lost value from professional managers maximizing their own utility, rather than the value of the firm. Theory suggests that the choice of capital structure may help mitigate these agency costs. Under the agency costs hypothesis, high leverage or a low equity/asset ratio reduces the agency costs of outside equity and increases firm value by constraining or encouraging managers to act more in the interests of shareholders. Since the seminal paper by Jensen and Meckling (1976), a vast literature on such agency-theoretic explanations of capital structure has developed (see Harris and Raviv 1991 and Myers 2001 for reviews). Greater financial leverage may affect managers and reduce agency costs through the threat of liquidation, which causes personal losses to managers of salaries, reputation, perquisites, etc. (e.g., Grossman and Hart 1982, Williams 1987), and through pressure to generate cash flow to pay interest expenses (e.g., Jensen 1986). Higher leverage can mitigate conflicts between shareholders and managers concerning the choice of investment (e.g., Myers 1977), the amount of risk to undertake (e.g., Jensen and Meckling 1976, Williams 1987), the conditions under which the firm is liquidated (e.g., Harris and Raviv 1990), and dividend policy (e.g., Stulz 1990).A testable prediction of this class of models is that increasing the leverage ratio should result in lower agency costs of outside equity and improved firm performance, all else held equal. However, when leverage becomes relatively high, further increases generate significant agency costs of outside debt –including higher expected costs of bankruptcy or financial distress –arising from conflicts between bondholders and shareholders.1 Because it is difficult to distinguish empirically between the two sources of agency costs, we follow the literature and allow the relationship between total agency costs and leverage to be nonmonotonic.Despite the importance of this theory, there is at best mixed empirical evidence in the extant literature (see Harris and Raviv 1991, Titman 2000, and Myers 2001 for reviews). Tests of the agency costs hypothesis typically regress measures of firm performance on the equity capital ratio or otherindicator of leverage plus some control variables. At least three problems appear in the prior studies that we address in our application. In the case of the banking industry studied here, there are also regulatory costs associated with very high leverage.First, the measures of firm performance are usually ratios fashioned from financial statements or stock market prices, such as industry-adjusted operating margins or stock market returns. These measures do not net out the effects of differences in exogenous market factors that affect firm value, but are beyond management’s control and therefore cannot reflect agency costs. Thus, the tests may be confounded by factors that are unrelated to agency costs. As well, these studies generally do not set a separate benchmark for each firm’s performance that would be realized if agency costs were minimized.We address the measurement problem by using profit efficiency as our indicator of firm performance.The link between productive efficiency and agency costs was first suggested by Stigler (1976), and profit efficiency represents a refinement of the efficiency concept developed since that time.2 Profit efficiency evaluates how close a firm is to earning the profit that a best-practice firm would earn facing the same exogenous conditions. This has the benefit of controlling for factors outside the control of management that are not part of agency costs. In contrast, comparisons of standard financial ratios, stock market returns, and similar measures typically do not control for these exogenous factors. Even when the measures used in the literature are industry adjusted, they may not account for important differences across firms within an industry – such as local market conditions – as we are able to do with profit efficiency. In addition, the performance of a best-practice firm under the same exogenous conditions is a reasonable benchmark for how the firm would be expected to perform if agency costs were minimized.Second, the prior research generally does not take into account the possibility of reverse causation from performance to capital structure. If firm performance affects the choice of capital structure, then failure to take this reverse causality into account may result in simultaneous-equations bias. That is, regressions of firm performance on a measure of leverage may confound the effects of capital structure on performance with the effects of performance on capital structure.We address this problem by allowing for reverse causality from performance to capital structure. We discuss below two hypotheses for why firm performance may affect the choice of capital structure, the efficiency-risk hypothesis and the franchise-value hypothesis. We construct a two-equation structural model and estimate it using two-stage least squares (2SLS). An equation specifying profit efficiency as a function of the 2 Stigler’s argu ment was part of a broader exchange over whether productive efficiency (or X-efficiency) primarily reflects difficulties in reconciling the preferences of multiple optimizing agents – what is today called agency costs –versus “true”inefficiency, or failureto optimize (e.g., Stigler 1976, Leibenstein 1978). firm’s equity capital ratio and other variables is used to test the agency costs hypothesis, and an equation specifying the equity capital ratio as a function of the firm’s profit efficiency and other variables is used to test the net effects of the efficiency-risk and franchise-value hypotheses. Both equations are econometrically identified through exclusion restrictions that are consistent with the theories.Third, some, but not all of the prior studies did not take ownership structure into account. Under virtually any theory of agency costs, ownership structure is important, since it is the separation of ownership and control that creates agency costs (e.g., Barnea, Haugen, and Senbet 1985). Greater insider shares may reduce agency costs, although the effect may be reversed at very high levels of insider holdings (e.g., Morck, Shleifer, and Vishny 1988). As well, outside block ownership or institutional holdings tend to mitigate agency costs by creating a relatively efficient monitor of the managers (e.g., Shleifer and Vishny 1986). Exclusion of the ownership variables may bias the test results because the ownership variables may be correlated with the dependent variable in the agency cost equation (performance) and with the key exogenous variable (leverage) through the reverse causality hypotheses noted aboveTo address this third problem, we include ownership structure variables in the agency cost equation explaining profit efficiency. We include insider ownership, outside block holdings, and institutional holdings.Our application to data from the banking industry is advantageous because of the abundance of quality data available on firms in this industry. In particular, we have detailed financial data for a large number of firms producing comparable products with similar technologies, and information on market prices and other exogenous conditions in the local markets in which they operate. In addition, some studies in this literature find evidence of the link between the efficiency of firms and variables that are recognized to affect agency costs, including leverage and ownership structure (see Berger and Mester 1997 for a review).Although banking is a regulated industry, banks are subject to the same type of agency costs and other influences on behavior as other industries. The banks in the sample are subject to essentially equal regulatory constraints, and we focus on differences across banks, not between banks and other firms. Most banks are well above the regulatory capital minimums, and our results are based primarily on differences at the mar2. Theories of reverse causality from performance to capital structureAs noted, prior research on agency costs generally does not take into account the possibility ofreverse causation from performance to capital structure, which may result in simultaneous-equations bias. We offer two hypotheses of reverse causation based on violations of the Modigliani-Miller perfect-markets assumption. It is assumed that various market imperfections (e.g., taxes, bankruptcy costs, asymmetric information) result in a balance between those favoring more versus less equity capital, and that differences in profit efficiency move the optimal equity capital ratio marginally up or down.Under the efficiency-risk hypothesis, more efficient firms choose lower equity ratios than other firms, all else equal, because higher efficiency reduces the expected costs of bankruptcy and financial distress. Under this hypothesis, higher profit efficiency generates a higher expected return for a given capital structure, and the higher efficiency substitutes to some degree for equity capital in protecting the firm against future crises. This is a joint hypothesis that i) profit efficiency is strongly positively associated with expected returns, and ii) the higher expected returns from high efficiency are substituted for equity capital to manage risks.The evidence is consistent with the first part of the hypothesis, i.e., that profit efficiency is strongly positively associated with expected returns in banking. Profit efficiency has been found to be significantly positively correlated with returns on equity and returns on assets (e.g., Berger and Mester 1997) and other evidence suggests that profit efficiency is relatively stable over time (e.g., DeYoung 1997), so that a finding of high current profit efficiency tends to yield high future expected returns.The second part of the hypothesis –that higher expected returns for more efficient banks are substituted for equity capital –follows from a standard Altman z-score analysis of firm insolvency (Altman 1968). High expected returns and high equity capital ratio can each serve as a buffer against portfolio risks to reduce the probabilities of incurring the costs of financial distress bankruptcy, so firms with high expected returns owing to high profit efficiency can hold lower equity ratios. The z-score is the number of standard deviations below the expected return that the actual return can go before equity is depleted and the firm is insolvent, zi = (μi +ECAPi)/σi, where μi and σi are the mean and standard deviation, respectively, of the rate of return on assets, and ratios for those that were fully owned by a single owner-manager. This may be an improvement in the analysis of agency costs for small firms, but it does not address our main issues of controlling for differences in exogenous conditions and in setting up individualized firm benchmarks for performance.ECAPi is the ratio of equity to assets. Based on the first part of the efficiency-risk hypothesis, firms with higher efficiency will have higher μi. Based on the second part of the hypothesis, a higher μi allows the firm to have a lower ECAPi for a ven z-score, so that more efficient firms may choose lower equity capital ratios.文章出处：Raposo Clara C. Capital Structure and Firm Performance . Journal of Finance. Blackwell publishing. 2005, (6): 2701-2727.资本结构与企业绩效1.概述代理费用不管在金融还是在非金融行业，都是非常重要的企业治理问题。

本科毕业论文（设计）外文翻译原文：The Determinants of Capital Structure ChoiceI. Determinants of Capital StructureIn this section, we present a brief discussion of the attributes that different theories of capital structure suggest may affect the firm's debt-equity choice. These attributes are denoted asset structure, non-debt tax shields, growth, uniqueness, industry classification, size, earnings volatility, and profitability. The attributes, their relation to the optimal capital structure choice, and their observable indicators are discussed below.A. Collateral Value of AssetsMost capital structure theories argue that the type of assets owned by a firm in some way affects its capital structure choice. Scott suggests that, by selling secured debt, firms increase the value of their equity by expropriating wealth from their existing unsecured creditors.Arguments put forth by Myers and Majluf also suggest that firms may find it advantageous to sell secured debt. Their model demonstrates that there may be costs associated with issuing securities about which the firm's managers have better information than outside shareholders. Issuing debt secured by property with known values avoids these costs. For this reason, firms with assets that can be used as collateral may be expected to issue more debt to take advantage of this opportunity.Work by Galai and Masulis , Jensen and Meckling , and Myers suggests that stockholders of leveraged firms have an incentive to invest yet to expropriate wealth from the firm's bondholders. This incentive may also induce a positive relation between debt ratios and the capacity of firms to collateralize their debt. If the debt can be collateralized, the borrower is restricted to use the funds for a specified project. Since no such guarantee can be used for projects that cannot be collateralized, creditors may require more favorable terms, which in turn may lead such firms to use equity rather than debt financing.The tendency of managers to consume more than the optimal level of perquisites mayproduce the opposite relation between collateralized capital and debt levels. Grossman and Hart suggest that higher debt levels diminish this tendency because of the increased threat of bankruptcy. Managers of highly levered firms will also be less able to consume excessive perquisites since bondholders (or bankers) are inclined to closely monitor such firms. The costs associated with this agency relation may be higher for firms with assets that are less collateralized since monitoring the capital outlays of such firms is probably more difficult. For this reason, firms with less collateralized assets may choose higher debt levels to limit their managers' consumption of perquisites.The estimated model incorporates two indicators for the collateral value attribute. They include the ratio of intangible assets to total assets (INT/TA) and the ratio of inventory plus gross plant and equipment to total assets (IGP/TA). The first indicator is negatively related to the collateral value attribute, while the second is positively related to collateral value.B. Non-Debt Tax ShieldsDeAngelo and Masulis present a model of optimal capital structure that incorporates the impact of corporate taxes, personal taxes, and non-debt-related corporate tax shields. They argue that tax deductions for depreciation and investment tax credits are substitutes for the tax benefits of debt financing. As a result, firms with large non-debt tax shields relative to their expected cash flow include less debt in their capital structures.Indicators of non-debt tax shields include the ratios of investment tax credits over total assets (ITC/TA), depreciation over total assets (DITA), and a direct estimate of non-debt tax shields over total assets (NDT/TA). The latter measure is calculated from observed federal income tax payments (T), operating income (OI), interest payments (i), and the corporate tax rate during our sample period (48%), using the following equation:NDT = OI-i-T/0.48which follows from the equalityT= 0.48(0I- i-NDT)These indicators measure the current tax deductions associated with capital equipment and, hence, only partially capture the non-debt tax shield variable suggested by DeAngelo and Masulis. First, this attribute excludes tax deductions that are not associated with capital equipment, such as research and development and selling expenses. (These variables, used as indicators of anotherattribute, are discussed later.) More important, our non-debt tax shield attribute represents tax deductions rather than tax deductions net of true economic depreciation and expenses, which is the economic attribute suggested by theory. Unfortunately, this preferable attribute would be very difficult to measure.C. GrowthAs we mentioned previously, equity-controlled firms have a tendency to invest suboptimally to expropriate wealth from the firm's bondholders. The cost associated with this agency relationship is likely to be higher for firms in growing industries, which have more flexibility in their choice of future investments. Expected future growth should thus be negatively related to long-term debt levels. Myers, however, noted that this agency problem is mitigated if the firm issues short-term rather than long-term debt. This suggests that short-term debt ratios might actually be positively related to growth rates if growing firms substitute short-term financing for long-term financing. Jensen and Meckling, Smith and Warner, and Green argued that the agency costs will be reduced if firms issue convertible debt. This suggests that convertible debt ratios may be positively related to growth opportunities.It should also be noted that growth opportunities are capital assets that add value to a firm but cannot be collateralized and do not generate current taxable income. For this reason, the arguments put forth in the previous subsections also suggest a negative relation between debt and growth opportunities.Indicators of growth include capital expenditures over total assets (CE/TA) and the growth of total assets measured by the percentage change in total assets (GTA). Since firms generally engage in research and development to generate future investments, research and development over sales (RD/S) also serves as an indicator of the growth attribute.D. UniquenessTitman presents a model in which a firm's liquidation decision is causally linked to its bankruptcy status. As a result, the costs that firms can potentially impose on their customers, suppliers, and workers by liquidating are relevant to their capital structure decisions. Customers, workers, and suppliers of firms that produce unique or specialized products probably suffer relatively high costs in the event that they liquidate. Their workers and suppliers probably have job specific skills and capital, and their customers may find itdifficult to find alternative servicing for their relatively unique products. For these reasons, uniqueness is expected to be negatively related to debt ratios.Indictors of uniqueness include expenditures on research and development over sales (RD/S), selling expenses over sales (SEIS), and quit rates (QR), the percentage of the industry's total work force that voluntarily left their jobs in the sample years. It is postulated that RD/S measures uniqueness because firms that sell products with close substitutes ar'e likely to do less research and development since their innovations can be more easily duplicated. In addition, successful research and development projects lead to new products that differ from those existing in the market. Firms with relatively unique products are expected to advertise more and, in general, spend more in promoting and selling their products. Hence, SE/S is expected to be positively related to uniqueness. However, it is expected that firms in industries with high quit rates are probably relatively less unique since firms that produce relatively unique products tend to employ workers with high levels of job-specific human capital who will thus find it costly to leave their jobs.It is apparent from two of the indicators of uniqueness, RD/S and SEIS, that this attribute may also be related to non-debt tax shields and collateral value. Research and development and some selling expenses (such as advertising) can be considered capital goods that are immediately expensed and cannot be used as collateral. Given that our estimation technique can only imperfectly control for these other attributes, the uniqueness attribute may be negatively related to the observed debt ratio because of its positive correlation with non-debt tax shields and its negative correlation with collateral value.E. Industry ClassificationTitman suggests that firms that make products requiring the availability of specialized servicing and spare parts will find liquidation especially costly. This indicates that firms manufacturing machines and equipment should be financed with relatively less debt. To measure this, we include a dummy variable equal to one for firms with SIC codes between 3400 and 4000 (firms producing machines and equipment) and zero otherwise as a separate attribute affecting the debt ratios.F. SizeA number of authors have suggested that leverage ratios may be related to firm size.Warner and Ang, Chua, and McConnell provide evidence that suggests that direct bankruptcy costs appear to constitute a larger proportion of a firm's value as that value decreases. It is also the case that relatively large firms tend to be more diversified and less prone to bankruptcy. These arguments suggest that large firms should be more highly leveraged.The cost of issuing debt and equity securities is also related to firm size. In particular, small firms pay much more than large firms to issue new equity (see Smith) and also somewhat more to issue long-term debt. This suggests that small firms may be more leveraged than large firms and may prefer to borrow short term (through bank loans) rather than issue long-term debt because of the lower fixed costs associated with this alternative.We use the natural logarithm of sales (LnS) and quit rates (QR) as indicators of size. The logarithmic transformation of sales reflects our view that a size effect, if it exists, affects mainly the very small firms. The inclusion of quit rates, as an indicator of size, reflects the phenomenon that large firms, which often offer wider career opportunities to their employees, have lower quit rates.G. V olatilityMany authors have also suggested that a firm's optimal debt level is a decreasing function of the volatility of earnings. We were only able to include one indicator of volatility that cannot be directly affected by the firm's debt level. It is the standard deviation of the percentage change in operating income (SIGOI). Since it is the only indicator of volatility, we must assume that it measures this attribute without error.H. ProfitabilityMyers cites evidence from Donaldson and Brealey and Myers that suggests that firms prefer raising capital, first from retained earnings, second from debt, and third from issuing new equity. He suggests that this behavior may be due to the costs of issuing new equity. These can be the costs discussed in Myers and Majluf that arise because of asymmetric information, or they can be transaction costs. In either case, the past profitability of a firm, and hence the amount of earnings available to be retained, should be an important determinant of its current capital structure. We use the ratios of operating income over sales (OI/S) and operating income over total assets (OI/TA) as indicators of profitability.II. Measures of Capital StructureSix measures of financial leverage are used in this study. They are long-term, short-term, and convertible debt divided by market and by book values of equity.8 Although these variables could have been combined to extract a common "debt ratio" attribute, which could in turn be regressed against the independent attributes, there is good reason for not doing this. Some of the theories of capital structure have different implications for the different types of debt, and, for the reasons discussed below, the predicted coefficients in the structural model may differ according to whether debt ratios are measured in terms of book or market values. Moreover, measurement errors in the dependent variables are subsumed in the disturbance term and do not bias the regression coefficients.Data limitations force us to measure debt in terms of book values rather than market values. It would, perhaps, have been better if market value data were available for debt. However, Bowman demonstrated that the cross-sectional correlation between the book value and market value of debt is very large, so the misspecification due to using book value measures is probably fairly small. Furthermore, we have no reason to suspect that the cross-sectional differences between market values and book values of debt should be correlated with any of the determinants of capital structure suggested by theory, so no obvious bias will result because of this misspecification.Source: Sheridan Titman; Roberto Wessels,1988.“The Determinants of Capital Structure Choice”. The Journal of Finance. Vol.43, No.1, march.pp.1-19.译文：资本结构的影响因素I、资本结构的决定因素在本节中，我们提出了一个简短讨论资本结构的不同理论认为可能会影响公司的债务权益选择的属性。

资本结构静态优化方法Optimizing capital structure is a crucial task for businesses aiming to maximize their value and minimize risk. 资本结构优化是企业最大化价值和最小化风险的一个关键任务。

It involves deciding on the mix of debt and equity that the company should use to finance its operations. 这涉及决定公司应该使用多少债务和股本来资助其运营。

There are various static optimization methods that can help companies determine the most efficient capital structure. 有各种静态优化方法可以帮助公司确定最有效的资本结构。

These methods include the Net Income Approach, Net Operating Income Approach, Traditional Approach, and Modigliani-Miller Theorem. 这些方法包括净收入法、净营业收入法、传统法以及莫迪格利安尼-米勒定理。

The Net Income Approach focuses on maximizing the wealth of shareholders by increasing the proportion of debt in the capital structure. 净收入法侧重于通过增加资本结构中的债务比例来最大化股东的财富。

By utilizing debt, the company can benefit from the tax shield that comes with the interest payments. 通过利用债务, 公司可以从随利息支付而来的税收盾牌中受益。