基于企业生命周期的资本结构决策.doc

本科毕业论文（设计） 外 文 翻 译 原文： Capital Structure Decisions During a Firm’s Life Cycle In one of the most interesting studies 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 business’s life cycle determines the nature of its financial needs, the availability of financial resources, and the related 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 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 their 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 recent 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 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 the early stages, while debt becomes relevant only in the late stages. In other