We study incremental capital structure decisions of Dutch companies. From 1977 to 1996 these companies have made 110 issues of public and private seasoned equity and 137 public issues of straight debt. Managers of Dutch companies are entrenched. For this reason a discrepancy exists between managerial decisions and shareholder reactions. Confirming Zwiebel [American Economic Review (1996) 1197–1215] we find that Dutch managers avoid the disciplining role of debt allowing them to overinvest. However, the market reactions show that this overinvestment behavior is recognized. We do not find a confirmation of the adverse selection model of Myers and Majluf [Journal of Financial Economics (1984) 187–221]. This is probably due to the entrenchment of managers and the prevalence of rights issues.

In this paper we present the results of an international survey among 313 cfos on capital structure choice. We document several interesting insights on how theoretical concepts are being applied by professionals in the uk, the netherlands, germany, and france and we directly compare our results with previous findings from the us our results emphasize the presence of pecking-order behavior. At the same time this behavior is not driven by asymmetric information considerations. The static trade-off theory is confirmed by the importance of a target debt ratio in general, but also specifically by tax effects and bankruptcy costs. Overall, we find remarkably low disparities across countries, despite the presence of significant institutional differences. We find that private firms differ in many respects from publicly listed firms, e.g. Listed firms use their stock price for the timing of new issues. Finally, we do not find substantial evidence that agency problems are important in capital structure choice.

We analyze the importance of firm-specific and country-specific factors in the leverage choice of firms from 42 countries around the world. Our analysis yields two new results. First, we find that firm-specific determinants of leverage differ across countries, while prior studies implicitly assume equal impact of these determinants. Second, although we concur with the conventional direct impact of country-specific factors on the capital structure of firms, we show that there is an indirect impact because country-specific factors also influence the roles of firm-specific determinants of leverage.