資本結(jié)構(gòu)難題【外文翻譯】

1、 外文翻譯原文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.譯文資本結(jié)構(gòu)之謎資料來源：論文資源庫作者：斯圖爾特？CM爾斯本文的標(biāo)題是意在提醒費(fèi)希爾布萊克的著名理論股利之謎”本文的標(biāo)題是意在提醒大家費(fèi)希爾布萊克的著名理論股利之謎”，他最后說，“公司應(yīng)該做些什么與股息政策相關(guān)的內(nèi)容？我們不知道。”首先我會要求，“公司如何選 擇自己的資本結(jié)構(gòu)？”同樣，答案是，“我們不知道?！弊屓瞬唤獾氖琴Y本結(jié)構(gòu)比股息更強(qiáng)硬。我們知道不少有關(guān)股利政策的內(nèi)容， 約翰林特納的模式如何設(shè)置分紅公司的歷史可以追溯到1201至1956年，似乎

39、仍在使用。我們知道，股票價格應(yīng)對意外的股利變動，所以很明顯，股息有資 料內(nèi)容這個觀察至少可以追溯到1961年米勒和莫迪利亞尼。我們不知道是否會增加要求高股息收益率的預(yù)期回報率的投資者，作為增加稅收的建議的 MM股利無關(guān)的證明，但至少金融經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)家在這個問題上罵個不停。相比之下，我們對資本結(jié)構(gòu)了解很少。我們不知道公司如何選擇債券，股 票或混合型證券的問題。我們最近才發(fā)現(xiàn)，資本結(jié)構(gòu)的變化信息是傳遞給投資 者的。目前幾乎已經(jīng)沒有財務(wù)杠桿之間是否和投資者的要求回報率的關(guān)系研究 的純MM理論預(yù)測了。在一般情況下，我們的企業(yè)對融資行為認(rèn)識不足，以及如何影響安全行為的回報。我不想聽起來太悲觀或沮喪。我們已經(jīng)積

40、累到很多關(guān)于資本結(jié)構(gòu)選擇的有 益見解，首先是最重要的一點(diǎn)是， MM的無杠桿定理（命題一）。我們對最優(yōu) 資本結(jié)構(gòu)的想法漫長而艱辛。我們很多人都翻譯這些理論，給管理人員或多或 少最佳的資本結(jié)構(gòu)的意見。但是，我們的理論似乎不能解釋實(shí)際的融資行為， 當(dāng)我們遠(yuǎn)離實(shí)際決定的解釋，指導(dǎo)企業(yè)優(yōu)化資本結(jié)構(gòu)看似狂妄。我做的已經(jīng)多 于寫的最優(yōu)資本結(jié)構(gòu)的份額，所以我借此機(jī)會做出修訂，并努力推動一些新的 研究方向。我會對比兩個對資本結(jié)構(gòu)的思考方式：1、靜態(tài)權(quán)衡的框架內(nèi)，該公司被視為設(shè)定一個目標(biāo)負(fù)債比率并逐步走向之， 在大致相同的方式，一個公司調(diào)整股息邁向目標(biāo)。2、老式啄食理論的框架，該公司寧愿內(nèi)部融資好于外部融資， 和

41、如果發(fā)行 債券的債務(wù)和權(quán)益。在純啄食理論，該企業(yè)沒有明確界定的目標(biāo)債務(wù)價值的比 例。最近的理論工作注入了最后的名次框架工作的新生命。我將證明，這一理 論至少執(zhí)行以及在解釋我們所知道的實(shí)際融資選擇與股票價格的平均影響靜態(tài) 權(quán)衡理論。管理和中性突變假說我隨意，可能不公平，排除“管理”理論這或許可以解釋公司的資本結(jié)構(gòu) 的選擇。我選擇不考慮剪斷經(jīng)理人的行為對股東的利益關(guān)系的模型。我也回避米勒的想法“中性突變”。他認(rèn)為，企業(yè)到一些融資模式或習(xí)慣 對公司價值下降沒有重大影響。這種習(xí)慣可能會讓管理者感覺更好，由于他們 沒有壞處，沒人關(guān)心停止或更改。因此，誰確定這些習(xí)慣并使用它們來預(yù)測融 資行為就不會被解釋的有多重要。這個中性突變的想法是一個重要的警告。由于時間和想象力，經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)家通常 可以發(fā)明一些明顯的經(jīng)濟(jì)模式，合理分配到任何偶發(fā)事件。但是，嚴(yán)格的零假 設(shè)中性突變使得研究太難進(jìn)行。如果一個經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)家指出了各種融資戰(zhàn)略成本， 獲得獨(dú)立的證據(jù)證明他確實(shí)有成本，然后在這些成本的基礎(chǔ)上解釋了企業(yè)的融 資行為