资本结构难题【外文翻译】

1、 外文翻译原文The Capital Structure PuzzleMaterial Source: Paper ResourcesAuthor: Stewart C. MyersTHISPAPERS TITLE IS INTENDED to remind you of Fischer Blacks well-known note on The Dividend Puzzle, which he closed by saying, What should the corporation do about dividend policy? We dont know. I will start

2、by asking, How do firms choose their capital structures? Again, the answer is, We dont know.The capital structure puzzle is tougher than the dividend one. We know quite a bit about dividend policy. John Lintners model of how firms set dividends 1201 dates back to 1956, and it still seems to work. We

3、 know stock prices respond to unanticipated dividend changes, so it is clear that dividends have information content-this observation dates back at least to Miller and Modigliani (MM) in 1961. We do not know whether high dividend yield increases the expected rate of return demanded by investors, as

4、adding taxes to the MM proof of dividend irrelevance suggests, but financial economists are at least hammering away at this issue.By contrast, we know very little about capital structure. We do not know how firms choose the debt, equity or hybrid securities they issue. We have only recently discover

5、ed that capital structure changes convey information to investors. There has been little if any research testing whether the relationship between financial leverage and investors required return is as the pure MM theory predicts. In general, we have inadequate understanding of corporate financing be

6、havior, and of how that behavior affects security returns.I do not want to sound too pessimistic or discouraged. We have accumulated many helpful insights into capital structure choice, starting with the most important one, MMs No Magic in Leverage Theorem (Proposition 1) 1311. We have thought long

7、and hard about what these insights imply for optimal capital structure. Many of us have translated these theories, or stories, of optimal capital structure into more or less definite advice to managers. But our theories dont seem to explain actual financing behavior, and it seemspresumptuous to advi

8、se firms on optimal capital structure when we are so far from explaining actual decisions. I have done more than my share of writing on optimal capital structure, so I take this opportunity to make amends, and to try to push research in some new directions.I will contrast two ways of thinking about

9、capital structure:A static tradeoff framework, in which the firm is viewed as setting a target debt-to-value ratio and gradually moving towards it, in much the same way that a firm adjusts dividends to move towards a target payout ratio.An old-fashioned pecking order framework, in which the firm pre

10、fers internal to external financing, and debt to equity if it issues securities. In the pure pecking order theory, the firm has no well-defined target debt-to-value ratio. Recent theoretical work has breathed new life into the pecking order frame- work. I will argue that this theory performs at leas

11、t as well as the static tradeoff theory in explaining what we know about actual financing choices and their average impacts on stock prices.Managerial and Neutral Mutation HypothesesI have arbitrarily, and probably unfairly, excluded managerial theories which might explain firms capital structure ch

12、oices. I have chosen not to consider models which cut the umbilical cord that ties managers acts to stockholders interests.I am also sidestepping Millers idea of neutral mutation. He suggests that firms fall into some financing patterns or habits which have no material effect on firm value. The habi

13、ts may make managers feel better, and since they do no harm, no one cares to stop or change them. Thus someone who identifies these habits and uses them to predict financing behavior would not be explaining anything important.The neutral mutations idea is important as a warning. Given time and imagi

14、nation, economists can usually invent some model that assigns apparent economic rationality to any random event. But taking neutral mutation as a strict null hypothesis makes the game of research too tough to play. If an economist identifies costs of various financing strategies, obtains independent

15、 evidence that he costs are really there, and then builds a model based on these costs which explains firms financing behavior, then some progress has been made, even if it proves difficult to demonstrate that, say, a type A financing strategy gives higher firm value than a type B. (In fact, we woul

16、d never see type B if all firms follow value-maximizing strategies).There is another reason for not immediately embracing neutral mutations: we know investors are interested in the firms financing choices, because stock prices change when the choices are announced. The change might be explained as a

17、n information effect having nothing to do with financing per se-but again, it is bit too easy to wait until the results of an event study are in, and then to think of an information story to explain them. On the other hand, if one starts by assuming that managers have special information, builds a m

18、odel of how that information changes financing choices, and predicts which choices will be interpreted by investors as good or bad news, then some progress has been made.So this paper is designed as a one-on-one competition of the static tradeoff and pecking-order stories. If neither story explains

19、actual behavior, the neutral mutations story will be there faithfully waiting.The Static Tradeoff HypothesisA firms optimal debt ratio is usually viewed as determined by a tradeoff of the costs and benefits of borrowing, holding the firms assets and investment plans constant. The firm is portrayed a

20、s balancing the value of interest tax shields against various costs of bankruptcy or financial embarassment. Of course, there is controversy about how valuable the tax shields are, and which, if any, of the costs of financial embarassment are material, but these disagreements give only variations on

21、 a theme. The firm is supposed to substitute debt for equity, or equity for debt, until the value of the firm is maximized. Thus the debt-equity tradeoff is as illustrated in Fig. 1.Costs of adjustment. If there were no costs of adjustment, and the static tradeoff theory is correct, then each firms

22、observed debt-to-value ratio should be its optimal ratio. However, there must be costs, and therefore lags, in adjusting to the optimum. Firms can not immediately offset the random events that bump them away from the optimum, so there should be some cross-sectional dispersion of actual debt ratios a

23、cross a sample of firms having the same target ratio.Large adjustment costs could possibly explain the observed wide variation in actual debt ratios, since firms would be forced into long excursions away from their optimal ratios. But there is nothing in the usual static tradeoff stories suggesting

24、that adjustment costs are a first-order concern-in fact, they are rarely mentioned. Invoking them without modelling them is a cop-out.Any cross-sectional test of financing behavior should specify whether firms debt ratios differ because they have different optimal ratios or because their actual rati

25、os diverge from optimal ones. It is easy to get the two cases mixed up. For example, think of the early cross-sectional studies which attempted to test MMsProposition I. These studies tried to find out whether differences in leverage affected the market value of the firm (or the market capitalizatio

26、n rate for its operating income). With hindsight, we can quickly see the problem: if adjustment costs are small, and each firm in the sample is at, or close to its optimum, then the in-sample dispersion of debt ratios must reflect differences in risk or in other variables affecting optimal capital s

27、tructure. But then MMs Proposition I cannot be tested unless the effects of risk and other variables on firm value can be adjusted for. By now we have learned from experience how hard it is to hold other things constant in cross-sectional regressions.Of course, one way to make sense of these tests i

28、s to assume that adjustment costs are small, but managers dont know, or dont care, what the optimal debt ratio is, and thus do not stay close to it. The researcher then assumes some (usually unspecified) managerial theory of capital structure choice. This may be a convenient assumption for a cross-s

29、ectional test of MMs Proposition I, but not very helpful if the object is to understand financing behavior.But suppose we dont take this managerial fork. Then if adjustment costs are small, and firms stay near their target debt ratios, I find it hard to understand the observed diversity of capital s

30、tructures across firms that seem similar in a static tradeoff framework. If adjustment costs are large, so that some firms take extended excursions away from their targets, then we ought to give less attention to refining our static tradeoff stories and relatively more to understanding what the adju

31、stment costs are, why they are so important, and how rational managers would respond to them.But I am getting ahead of my story. On to debt and taxes.Debt and taxes. Millers famous Debt and Taxes paper cut us loose from the extreme implications of the original MM theory, which made interest tax shie

32、lds so valuable that we could not explain why all firms were not awash in debt. Miller described an equilibrium of aggregate supply and demand for corporate debt, in which personal income taxes paid by the marginal investor in corporate debt just offset the corporate tax saving. However, since the e

33、quilibrium only determines aggregates, debt policy should not matter for any single tax- paying firm. Thus Millers model allows us to explain the dispersion of actual debt policies without having to introduce non-value-maximizing manager.Trouble is, this explanation works only if we assume that all

34、firms face approximately the same marginal tax rate, and that is an assumption we can immediately reject. The extensive trading of depreciation tax shields and investment tax credits, through financial leasesand other devices, proves that plenty of firms face low marginal rates.Given significant dif

35、ferences in effective marginal tax rates, and given that the static tradeoff theory works, we would expect to find a strong tax effect in any cross-sectional test, regardless of whose theory of debt and taxes you believe.Figure 2 plots the net tax gain from corporate borrowing against the expected r

36、ealizable tax shield from a future deduction of one dollar of interest paid. For some firms this number is 46 cents, or close to it. At the other extreme, there are firms with large unused loss carry forwards which pay no immediate taxes. An extra dollar of interest paid by these firms would create

37、only a potential future deduction, usable when and if the firm earns enough to work off prior carry for- wards. The expected realizable tax shield is positive but small. Also, there are firms paying taxes today which cannot be sure they will do so in the future. Such a firm values expected future in

38、terest tax shields at somewhere between zero and the full statutory rate.译文资本结构之谜资料来源：论文资源库作者：斯图尔特？CM尔斯本文的标题是意在提醒费希尔布莱克的著名理论股利之谜”本文的标题是意在提醒大家费希尔布莱克的著名理论股利之谜”，他最后说，“公司应该做些什么与股息政策相关的内容？我们不知道。”首先我会要求，“公司如何选 择自己的资本结构？”同样，答案是，“我们不知道。”让人不解的是资本结构比股息更强硬。我们知道不少有关股利政策的内容， 约翰林特纳的模式如何设置分红公司的历史可以追溯到1201至1956年，似乎

39、仍在使用。我们知道，股票价格应对意外的股利变动，所以很明显，股息有资 料内容这个观察至少可以追溯到1961年米勒和莫迪利亚尼。我们不知道是否会增加要求高股息收益率的预期回报率的投资者，作为增加税收的建议的 MM股利无关的证明，但至少金融经济学家在这个问题上骂个不停。相比之下，我们对资本结构了解很少。我们不知道公司如何选择债券，股 票或混合型证券的问题。我们最近才发现，资本结构的变化信息是传递给投资 者的。目前几乎已经没有财务杠杆之间是否和投资者的要求回报率的关系研究 的纯MM理论预测了。在一般情况下，我们的企业对融资行为认识不足，以及如何影响安全行为的回报。我不想听起来太悲观或沮丧。我们已经积

40、累到很多关于资本结构选择的有 益见解，首先是最重要的一点是， MM的无杠杆定理（命题一）。我们对最优 资本结构的想法漫长而艰辛。我们很多人都翻译这些理论，给管理人员或多或 少最佳的资本结构的意见。但是，我们的理论似乎不能解释实际的融资行为， 当我们远离实际决定的解释，指导企业优化资本结构看似狂妄。我做的已经多 于写的最优资本结构的份额，所以我借此机会做出修订，并努力推动一些新的 研究方向。我会对比两个对资本结构的思考方式：1、静态权衡的框架内，该公司被视为设定一个目标负债比率并逐步走向之， 在大致相同的方式，一个公司调整股息迈向目标。2、老式啄食理论的框架，该公司宁愿内部融资好于外部融资， 和

41、如果发行 债券的债务和权益。在纯啄食理论，该企业没有明确界定的目标债务价值的比 例。最近的理论工作注入了最后的名次框架工作的新生命。我将证明，这一理 论至少执行以及在解释我们所知道的实际融资选择与股票价格的平均影响静态 权衡理论。管理和中性突变假说我随意，可能不公平，排除“管理”理论这或许可以解释公司的资本结构 的选择。我选择不考虑剪断经理人的行为对股东的利益关系的模型。我也回避米勒的想法“中性突变”。他认为，企业到一些融资模式或习惯 对公司价值下降没有重大影响。这种习惯可能会让管理者感觉更好，由于他们 没有坏处，没人关心停止或更改。因此，谁确定这些习惯并使用它们来预测融 资行为就不会被解释的有多重要。这个中性突变的想法是一个重要的警告。由于时间和想象力，经济学家通常 可以发明一些明显的经济模式，合理分配到任何偶发事件。但是，严格的零假 设中性突变使得研究太难进行。如果一个经济学家指出了各种融资战略成本， 获得独立的证据证明他确实有成本，然后在这些成本的基础上解释了企业的融 资行为