Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to instruct upper level business students on the intricacies of the debt-equity choice with the emphasis on showing the interrelation of this choice with the plowback-payout choice. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is designed around a...

It has been argued that the Chinese state sector is advancing at the cost of the private sector. Focusing on publicly listed firms which are divided into state- and private-controlled firms, we investigate preferential access to debt and effects on firm performance. Focusing on the large...

This paper develops a framework for devising an adequate financial architecture for the so-called "new economy" firms, suggesting that these firms need a distinct and different optimal capital structure and corporate control or corporate governance mechanisms. It is shown that an adequate...

We present the puzzling evidence that, from 1962 to 2009, an average 10.2% of large public nonfinancial US firms have zero debt and almost 22% have less than 5% book leverage ratio. Zero-leverage behavior is a persistent phenomenon. Dividend-paying zero-leverage firms pay substantially higher...

Purpose –This study sets out to focus on the identification of determinants of real estate limited partnership (REIT) capital structure from a market perspective. Design/methodology/approach -This study uses ordinary least squares regression to test whether REIT capital structure is impacted...

Existing theories of a firm’s optimal capital structure seem to fail in explaining why many healthy and profitable firms rely heavily on equity financing, even though benefits associated with debt (like tax shields) appear to be high and the bankruptcy risk low. This holds in particular for...