Capital Structure Decisions: Which Factors are Reliably Important?
Preprint
- 10 October 2007
- preprint
- Published by Elsevier in SSRN Electronic Journal
Abstract
This paper examines the relative importance of many factors in the leverage decisions of publicly traded American firms from 1950 to 2003. The most reliable factors are median industry leverage (+ effect on leverage), market-to-book ratio (-), tangibility (+), profits (-), log of assets (+), and expected inflation (+). Industry subsumes a number of smaller effects. The empirical evidence seems reasonably consistent with some versions of the tradeoff theory of capital structure.Keywords
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