Capital Structure Choice: Some Evidence From An Emerging Economy, India

In a landmark paper Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller had demonstrated that in a typical neo- classical set up the average cost of capital to any firm is completely independent of its capital structure. However, skepticism about practical force of invariance proposition and dramatic changes in conclusion dominated this arena of work. Nonetheless, a relatively small body of empirical work has emphasized the factors like size, rate of growth of firm?s tangible asset, capital intensity, profitability, volatility of income and tax consideration in explaining the observed variation in capital structure across firms. Unfortunately this empirical research is by and large confined to the United States and a few advanced countries. Therefore, the book tries to fill this gap by answering many important questions like: How do the firms in Less Developed Countries (LDCs) finance their growth? To what extent do they rely on internal source of finance as opposed to the external sources of finance? These questions are not only important from a theoretical or academic standpoint but also from policy perspectives.