外文翻译--公司的股权结构、公司治理和资本结构决策——来自加纳的实证研究.doc

本科毕业论文（设计） 外 文 翻 译 原文： Ownership structure, corporate governance and capital structure decisions of firms Empirical evidence from Ghana 1. Introduction The relevance of capital structure to firm value remains fairly established following the seminal article by Modigliani and Miller, 1958 (Grabowski and Mueller, 1972; McCabe, 1979; Anderson and Reeb, 2003). Several theories including the pecking order theory, the free cash flow, the capital signaling, the trade-off, and market timing theories (windows of opportunities) and the fact that capital structure is voluntarily chosen by managers (Zwiebel, 1996) have been propounded to explain the choice of capital structure. Also, considerable research attention has been paid to the impact of agency costs on corporate financing since Jensen and Meckling (1976) published their paper. Crutchley and Hansen (1989) maintain that managers’ choice of stock ownership in the firm, the firm’s mixture of outside debt and equity financing, and dividends are meant to reduce the costs of agency conflicts. Bajaj et al. (1998) suggest that ownership is positively correlated with various measures of the debt-equity ratio (leverage), implying that ownership structure has a correlation with financial structure of firms (Kim and Sorensen, 1986; Mehran, 1992; Brailsford et al., 2002). Friend and Lang (1988) find that debt ratio is negatively related to managerial ownership. Brailsford et al. (2002) suggest that the relationship between managerial share ownership and leverage may in fact be inverted u-shaped. In addition, Berglo¨f (1990) suggests that in countries in which firms are typically closely held, debt finance plays a more prominent role than in countries characterized by more dispersed ownership structures suggesting the impact of insider system of corporate governance on financing structure of firms. Thomsen and Pedersen (2000) report empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that the identity of large owners – family, bank, and