Empirical Capital Structure: A Review: 12 (Foundations and Trends® in Finance) - Tapa blanda

The firm's capital structure - how it funds operations by raising capital from a variety of sources -- has attracted considerable attention from both academics and practitioners. The empirical capital structure literature explores both the cross-sectional determinants of capital structure as well as time-series changes. Empirical Capital Structure reviews both aspects of this literature. Empirical Capital Structure is organized around a simple framework that contains three key ingredients: · the costs and benefits that determine a firm's capital structure · the existence of shocks that cause firms to deviate, at least temporarily, from their targets. · the presence of factors that may prevent firms from constantly maintaining debt ratios that match their targets. Empirical Capital Structure is organized as follows. Section II discusses specification and econometric issues that will be important for many of the tests considered. Section III reviews cross-sectional capital structure determinants. Section IV explores factors that pull firms away from their leverage targets. Section V discusses reasons why firms might not immediately reverse the effect of these leverage shocks, apparently allowing deviations from their targets to persist for extended periods of time. Section VI explores a group of studies that look at how leverage feeds back into a firm's real business decisions. Finally, Section VII concludes and provides suggestions for new research.

Sheridan Titman, University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon Sheridan Titman holds the Walter W. McAllister Centennial Chair in Financial Services at the University of Texas. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a consultant to a number of firms. Professor Titman began his academic career in 1980 at UCLA, where he served as the department chair for the finance group and as the Vice Chairman of the UCLA management school faculty. He has designed executive education programs in corporate financial strategy at UCLA and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, based on material developed for this textbook. In the 1988-89 academic year Professor Titman worked in Washington, D.C., as the special assistant to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, where he analyzed proposed legislation related to the stock and future markets, leveraged buyouts and takeovers. Between 1992 and 1994, he served as a founding professor of the school of Business and Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where his duties included the vice chairmanship of the faculty and chairmanship of the faculty appointments committee. From 1994 to 1997 he was the John J. Collins, S.J. Chair in International Finance at Boston College. Professor Titman's areas of expertise include investments, performance evaluation of portfolio managers, corporate finance and real estate. He is an editor of the Review of Financial Studies and serves on the board of a number of other finance and real estate journals. He is a past director of the American Finance Association and a current director of the Asia Pacific Finance Association.