1、本科毕业论文（设计） 外 文 翻 译 原文 ： Capital Structure and Debt Structure In this study, we provide a number of new insights into capital structure decisions by recognizing that firms simultaneously use different types, sources, and priorities of debt. These insights are based on a novel data set that records th
2、e type, source, and priority of every balance sheet debt instrument for a large sample of rated public firms. The data are collected directly from financial footnotes in firms annual 10-K filings and supplemented with information on pricing and covenants from three origination based datasets: Reuter
3、s LPCs Dealscan, Mergents Fixed Income Securities Database, and Thomsons SDC Platinum. To our knowledge, this data set is one of the most comprehensive sources of information on the debt structure of a sample of public firms: It contains the detailed composition of the stock of corporate debt on the
4、 balance sheet, which goes far beyond what is available from origination-based datasets alone. We begin by showing the importance of recognizing debt heterogeneity in capital structure studies. We classify debt into bank debt, straight bond debt, convertible bond debt, program debt (such as commerci
5、al paper), mortgage debt, and all other debt. For almost 70% of firm-year observations in our sample, balance sheet debt comprises significant amounts of at least two of these types. Even more striking is the fact that 25% of the observations in our sample experience no significant one-year change i
6、n their total debt but significantly adjust the underlying composition of their debt. Studies that treat corporate debt as uniform have ignored this heterogeneity, presumably in the interest of building more tractable theory models or due to a previous lack of data. In this section, we motivate our
7、empirical analysis of the relation between debt structure and credit quality by examining hypotheses from the theoretical literature on debt composition and priority. The first group of theories hypothesizes that firms should move from bank debt to non-bank debt as credit quality improves (Diamond,
8、1991； Chemmamur and Fulghieri, 1994； Boot and Thakor, 1997；Bolton and Freixas, 2000). The seminal article is Diamonds (1991b) model of reputation acquisition. In his model, firms graduate from bank debt to arms length debt by establishing a reputation for high earnings. More specifically, the main v
9、ariable that generates cross-sectional predictions is the ex-ante probability that a firm is a bad type with a bad project； this ex-ante probability is updated over periods based on earnings performance, and is interpreted as a credit rating. Bad firms have a lower history of earnings, and a higher
10、probability of selecting a bad project in the future. High quality firms borrow directly from arms length lenders and avoid additional costs of bank debt associated with monitoring,medium-quality firms borrow from banks that provide incentives from monitoring, and the lowest qualityfirms are ratione
11、d. The model by Bolton and Freixas (2000) explores the optimal mix of bonds, bank debt, and equity. The key distinction between bonds and bank debt is the monitoring ability of banks. If current returns are low and default is pending, banks can investigate the borrowers future profitability, whereas
12、 bond holders always liquidate the borrower. In their model, high quality firms do not value the ability of banks to investigate, and therefore rely primarily on arms length debt. Lower quality borrowers value theability to investigate by the bank, and thus rely more heavily on bank financing. Two m
13、ain hypotheses emerge from this kind of model. First, the lender with monitoring duties (the bank) should be the most senior in the capital structure. The intuition is as follows: a banks incentive to monitor is maximized when the bank appropriates the full return from its monitoring effort. In the
14、presence of senior or pari passu non-monitoring lenders, the bank is forced to share the return to monitoring with other creditors, which reduces the banks incentive to monitor.Second, the presence of junior non-bank creditors enhances the senior banks incentive tomonitor. This result follows from t
15、he somewhat counterintuitive argument that a bank has a strongerincentive to monitor if its claim is smaller. Park (2000) describes this intuition as follows: if the project continues, an impaired senior lender will get less than a sole lender simply because his claim is smaller. On the other hand,
16、if the project is liquidated, an impaired senior lender will get the same amount as a sole lender, the liquidation value. Given its lower value in the going concern, a bank with a smaller claim actually has a stronger incentive to monitor and liquidate the firm. The presence of junior debt reduces t
17、he size of the banks claim, which increases the amount of socially beneficial monitoring. The intuition of this latter result is evident if one considers a bank creditor with a claim that represents a very large fraction of the borrowers capital structure. In such a situation, the bank has less of a
18、n incentive to liquidate a risky borrower, given that the banks large claim benefits relatively more from risk-taking than a smaller claim. In other words, a large bank claim is more “equity-like” than a small bank claim given its upside potential. As a result, reducing the size of the senior bank c
19、laim by adding junior debt improves the banks incentive to detect risk-shifting. Alternatively, by holding a small stake in the firm, bank lenders are able to credibly threaten borrowers with liquidation, which makes their monitoring more powerful in reducing managerial value-decreasing behavior. Th
20、ere are at least two ways, however, in which the existing theories do not map into our empirical design. First, theories such as Diamond (1993), Besanko and Kanatas (1993), and Park (2000) derive a priority structure as the optimal contract under incentive conflicts, but they do not explicitly deriv
21、e the comparative static of how optimal priority structure should vary across a continuum of incentive conflict severity. A thought experiment close to this is provided by DeMarzo and Fishman (2007), who do examine the comparative statics of debt structure with respect to liquidation values,manageri
22、al patience, and managerial private benefits. However, their predictions are about the mix between long-term debt and lines of credit, rather than priority structure per se. Second, with the exception of DeMarzo and Fishman (2007) and some other recent dynamic contracting work, these theories are static in nature, and therefore do
