资本结构的决定因素

The Determinants of Capital Structure

Xuefeng Li 1,a

1 School of Economic and Management, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry,

Zhengzhou, Henan, China

a lxf@

Keywords: Capital structure; panel data; fixed effects model

Abstract. In this paper, we use new samples of Shanghai 180 index of China to investigate the determinants of capital structure. With the panel data of 102 listed companies over the span from 2004 to 2006, we analyze the factors which influence the capital structure of these companies. As in other countries, collateral value of asset, firm size, and reputation have positive and significant effects on leverage, profitability, liquidity, non-debt tax shields have negative and significant effects on leverage. Different from those in other countries, leverage in Chinese firms increases with growth opportunity. We also find that Chinese listed firms tend to depend on short-term debt financing.

1. Introduction

Since the seminal works of Modigliani and Miller (1958, 1963) , there have been studies on capital structure of firns in such sectors as manufacturing, electriutility, non-profit hospital and agriculture firns. Modigliani and Miller (1958) argue on the basis of the very restrictive assumptions, such as, perfect capital markets, homogenous expectations, no taxes and no transaction costs, that, they draw a conclusion that capital structure is irrelevant to the value of a firm. The literature on capital structure has been expanded by many theoretical and empirical contributions. Much emphasis has been placed on releasing the assumptions made by Modigliani and Miller, in particular by taking into account corporate taxes (Modigliani and Miller, 1963), personal taxes (Miller, 1977), bankruptcy costs, agency costs (Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Myers,1977), and information asymmetries (Myers, 1984).

Despite decades of intensive theoretical and empirical research after MM theory, there is a surprising lack of consensus as to what factors determine capital structure. The reason is that the capital structure is not only the company's own decision-making, but closely related to a country's cultural differences, the stage of economic development, the financial system and corporate governance mechanism (Rajan and Zingales (1995) and Wald (1999)).

China is a developing country and the development of market economy is far from sufficient. As Chinese listed companies and the enterprises of mature market economies are at different levels of political, social and economic environment, facing different market structure, whether the choice of the capital structure of Chinese listed companies would be differences. The objective of this article is to carry out empirical testing, using panel data methodology, to investigate the determinants of the capital structure of Chinese listed companies.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we provide literature review on the determinants of the capital structure and hypothesis. The method and data are presented in Section 3, while our results are discussed in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 contains some concluding remarks.

2. Literature review and hypothesis

2011 2nd International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Vol.1-6

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