Capital Structure and Debt Structure
利用记录上市公司债务发行的新数据集，发现忽略债务异质性的传统资本结构研究遗漏了大量变化。低信用质量公司更可能拥有多层资本结构，包含有严格契约的担保银行债务和宽松契约的次级非银行债务。
Using a novel dataset that records individual debt issues on the balance sheets of public firms, we demonstrate that traditional capital structure studies that ignore debt heterogeneity miss substantial capital structure variation. Relative to high-credit-quality firms, low-credit-quality firms are more likely to have a multi-tiered capital structure consisting of both secured bank debt with tight covenants and subordinated non-bank debt with loose covenants. We discuss the extent to which these findings are consistent with existing theoretical models of debt structure in which firms simultaneously use multiple debt types to reduce incentive conflicts. The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org., Oxford University Press.