债务融资和财务柔性外文翻译.docVIP

本科毕业论文（设计） 外 文 翻 译 原文： Debt Financial and Financial Flexibility Firms that intentionally increase leverage through substantial debt issuances do so primarily as a response to operating needs rather than a desire to make a large equity payout. Subsequent debt reductions are neither rapid, nor the result of pro-active attempts to rebalance the firm’s capital structure towards a long-run target. Instead, the evolution of the firm’s leverage ratio depends primarily on whether or not the firm produces a financial surplus. In fact, firms that generate subsequent deficits tend to cover these deficits predominantly with more debt even though they exhibit leverage ratios that are well above estimated target levels. While many of our findings are difficult to reconcile with traditional capital structure models, they are broadly consistent with a capital structure theory in which financial flexibility, in the form of unused debt capacity, plays an important role in capital structure choices. The search for an empirically viable capital structure theory has confounded financial economists for decades. Standard trade-off models of capital structure have been criticized on the grounds that they do a poor job of explaining observed debt ratios. For example, trade-off models have difficulty explaining why firms tend to issue stock after exogenous decreases in leverage (i.e. stock price run-ups), why leverage ratios are negatively related to profitability, and why firms seem to forego potentially large interest tax shields. These models appear to do a similarly poor job of explaining capital structure dynamics. Although many recent studies report evidence consistent with active rebalancing of capital structures towards a target leverage level, the relatively slow speed of adjustment in this process implies substantial adjustment costs. However, Iliev and Welch’s (2009) finding that the average non-stock-return caused change in leverage is about 9% per year suggests that the slow