A Note on Corporate Capital Structure Theories

Financial theory revolves around rational participants who want to maximize their utility or wealth for a given level of risk. This maximization, in the first place, calls for the optimality of available resources, making capital financing decisions critical for corporations. Any discussion on optimal capital structure leads back to Modigliani and Miller’s classical capital structure irrelevance hypothesis (1958), according to which, in an efficient market, the value of the firm is unaffected by its choice of capital structure in the absence of taxes, bankruptcy costs, and asymmetric information. This irrelevance makes the firm’s managers indifferent to opting for debt or equity in the firm’s capital structure.