1、2056 单词， 3786 汉字 Source: Maurizio La Rocca, Tiziana La Rocca and Alfio Cariola； “Capital Structure Decisions During a Firms Life Cycle”,Small Business Economics, Online First, 24 August 2009:Pages 1-24. 原文： Capital Structure Decisions During a Firms Life Cycle In one of the most interesting studies
2、on the capital structure of small business, Berger and Udell (1998) asserted that general financial theory is not applicable to all businesses. Instead, the particular phase of a businesss life cycle determines the nature of its financial needs, the availability of financial resources, and the relat
3、ed cost of capital. This approach supports financial behaviors that are life-cycle-specific. As argued by Kaplan and Stromberg (2003), the changing degree of informational opacity that a firm faces drives its financial life cycle. From its inception to maturity, the financial needs of a firm change
4、according to its ability to generate cash, its growth opportunities, and the risk in realizing them. This will be reflected by evolving financing preferences and the nature of the specific financial choices that a firm makes during its life cycle. As a consequence, firms at the earlier stages of the
5、ir life cycles, which arguably tend to have larger levels of asymmetric information, more growth opportunities, and reduced size, should have specific capital structure drivers and should apply specific financing strategies as they advance through the different phases of their life cycles. Despite r
6、ecent attention to this topic, data on the financing structure of firms during the course of their life cycles is rather limited, and results are inconclusive (Gregory et al. 2005). Thus, we still need to extend our understanding of firms financial choices in this area, verifying, in particular, the
7、 existence of a pro-tempore optimal capital structure and the drivers that are potentially relevant to explain capital structure decisions as the firms progress along the different phases of their life cycle. In some contexts, equity (specifically, venture capital) has been shown to play a role in t
8、he early stages, while debt becomes relevant only in the late stages. In other contexts, the support of a financial intermediary (bank) is fundamental in the early stages, whereas the capital structure is rebalanced in later stages. There is common consensus regarding the importance of the instituti
9、onal environment in which a small firm is based (Beck et al. 2002, 2005). To operate in the USA or in Italy, small businesses must have access to a different variety of financial solutions in order to sustain their business in the light of asymmetric information. Thus, the financing preferences of t
10、hese firms are complex, and the appropriateness of the available options deserves further research. The study reported here contributes to this area of research in that it seeks to verify whether the life cycle is a relevant factor in a firms financing behavior. Empirical analysis is used to evaluat
11、e the role of the life cycle and the differences in the determinants of the debt/equity ratio throughout the life cycles of Italian small businesses. Specifically, the following questions are addressed: Do Italian firms have different financial structures during different stages of their life cycles
12、? How do Italian capital structure determinants change in the course of a firms life cycle? The paper is structured as follows. The first part examines the strategic financing choices of firms through a formal research hypothesis. In the second part, the sample is introduced, the variables and the m
13、odel are applied, and the results are shown. The third part presents the conclusions and a discussion of the implications for management and for future research. 2 Capital structure and financial life cycle The concept that firms evolve through a financial life cycle is well established in the liter
14、ature. There is, however, disagreement regarding sequential financing choices and the debt/equity ratio. Moreover, the lifecycle paradigm does not fit all small businesses (Berger and Udell 1998), and differences exist not only in terms of management determination but also in terms of different indu
15、stry affiliations and institutional environments in which firms operate (Harris and Raviv 1991； Beck et al. 2002； Rajan and Zingales 2004； Utrero-Gonzalez 2007). In their review of the capital structure literature, Harris and Raviv (1991) note that it is generally accepted that firms in a given indu
16、stry will have similar leverage ratios, which are relatively stable over time, while leverage ratios vary across industries. Specifically, the industry is a significant determinant of leverage, which alone has been found to explain up to 25% of within-country leverage variation (Bradley et al. 1984)
17、. Moreover, the institutional environment also has a crucial influence on capital structure decisions, as recently documented by Titman et al. (2003) for large companies, and by Gaud et al. (2005) for small firms. More than the type of financial system (market-based or bank-based), it is the efficie
18、ncy of the financial system (Rajan and Zingales 1995； Wald 1999； Booth et al. 2001) and of the general institutional context (Petersen and Rajan 1994, 1995； Berger and Udell 1995) that determines the financial growth of firms affecting capital structure decisions. Therefore, hypotheses on capital st
19、ructure determinants must take industry affiliation and the institutional environment into account. This is very much the case for firms that are particularly opaque and affected by asymmetric information. 2.1 Financial life cycle: theory and hypothesis Several hypotheses, as synthesized in Table 1,
20、 can be proposed for the consideration of the life cycle in explaining firms financing behavior. The use of internal resources as a substitute for external finance must be acknowledged, as in the pecking-order theory, because these reflect the severity of asymmetric information problems. Accordingly
21、, in this study, Hypothesis 1 deals with the role of profitability and the preferences regarding internal resources versus debt. Hypotheses 2 and 3, each of which is further divided into two formulations, address the different theoretical financial preferences during the life cycle of a firm. Hypoth
22、esis 2a attempts to describe the financial life cycle with respect to the age of a firm, while Hypothesis 3a is the reverse formulation. Hypothesis 2b attempts to describe the financial life cycle with respect to the role of a firms reputation, while Hypothesis 3b is the reverse formulation. Finally
23、, due to the fact that the previously mentioned effects can be heterogeneous for different industries and for firms operating in different institutional contexts, we explicitly take industry affiliation and the context of analysis into account. Hypothesis 1: pecking-order theory. The main approach to interpreting capital structure choices from the asymmetric information point of view is the pecking-order
