Capital Structure Decisions in Institutional Buyouts

Despite substantial progress in understanding what affects corporate financing decisions, a surprising lack of consensus has prompted researchers to continue to refine and test existing capital structure theories in different settings.

Christian Kühn explores the impact of institutional buyouts (IBOs) characteristics on the transaction's capital structure and examines the robustness of established theories in a context which deviates substantially from most empirical studies hitherto. He investigates detailed data from 94 IBOs across Europe by means of a set of univariate analyses and binomial logistic regressions. With regard to capital structure theories the identified relationships suggest a renaissance of the static trade-off theory while the relevance of the agency theory could only be confirmed in part. However, it appears that agency cost of debt assume a more influential role than do agency cost of equity.