资本结构之谜外文翻译.doc

外文 原文 The Capital Structure Puzzle Material Source: Paper Resources Author: Stewart C. Myers THISPAPERS 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 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 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 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 discovered 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 behavior, 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 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 defi