Analysis of the capital structure: an empirical study of listed companies in UK

The two competing models of financial investment decisions, the trade-off and pecking order models, share many predictions of financial leverage. The former indicates that firms gradually adjust the debt-equity ratio towards an optimum. The latter predicts that external financing is driven by financ...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Huo, Erman
Format: Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Language:English
Published: 2011
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/25244/
Description
Summary:The two competing models of financial investment decisions, the trade-off and pecking order models, share many predictions of financial leverage. The former indicates that firms gradually adjust the debt-equity ratio towards an optimum. The latter predicts that external financing is driven by financial deficit of internal funding. The basic pecking order model seems to have more time-series explanatory power than static trade-off model. These two models are contradicting on hypothesis of leverage variation driven by some variables. This paper tests the traditional trade-off model against the pecking order model of corporate financing in UK listed firms. It is shown that this test provides mixed evidence for the dominance of these two models.