Theories of Capital Structure

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2. Literature Review:

Capital structure is termed as an important area in financial decision making. It has relationship with other variables of financial decisions. Capital structure is composed of debt and equity capital that is used by the organizations to run its operations.

The debate on capital structure has been started after provision of theory of Irrelevance by Modigliani and Miller. Modigliani and Miller (1958) concluded that financial leverage has no affect the market value of firm. However the theory is based some assumptions that do not exist in the actual world. The assumptions are perfect capital markets, no taxes, homogenous expectations and no transaction costs. But the results may be different in presence of bankruptcy cost and tax shield treatment of interest payments that have impact on cost of capital. Modigliani and Miller (1963) have revised their earlier theory by including text benefit as determinant of the capital structure. They termed the interest expense on debt as tax saving instrument. The term is known as tax-shield in finance and it lowers the tax paid by the firm.

Brealey and Myers (2003) were of the point of view that the selection of capital structure is basically a marketing problem. They further explained that the firm can issue many different securities in numerous combinations, but it tries to find the specific combination that capitalizes the market value of firm. In this regard their argument is that the financial managers attempts to find out the combination that increases the market value of the firm. They also argued that a strategy which capitalizes the firm’s value also maximizes the wealth of the shareholders. In this regard, it may be deduced that the financial manager’s attentio...

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...on American industrial companies.

The Pecking Order hypothesis predicts that firms only sell their equity when the market have overvalued it (Myers, 1984). The base of the theory is that managers wants to give benefit to the existing shareholders. They are not willing to issue equity shares at low price than their actual value. It may be concluded that new share will only be issued when the market is willing to pay higher price than the actual value of shares. Therefore, it give a signal to investors that a firm is overpricing it equity.

Myers and Majluf (1984), ascertain that firms have preference to internal sources instead of external that have more cost than internal. Therefore, in the light of pecking order theory, it is deducted that the firms with higher profits will use equity mode of financing and firms will use debt financing who generate low earnings.

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