Like Caesar's Gaul, corporate finance is divided into three parts: theoretical, empirical, and normative. Important advances in any one of these three typically generate good ideas for the other two. I have been fortunate not to specialize in one part only. This review covers the history of...

This review evaluates the four major theories of corporate financing: (1) the Modigliani–Miller theory of capital-structure irrelevance, in which firm values and real investment decisions are unaffected by financing; (2) the trade-off theory, in which firms balance the tax advantages of...