Capital Structure Decisions and the Optimal Design of Corporate Market Debt Programs

Journal of Corporate Finance, Volume 49, April 2018, Pages 141-167

This paper provides a joint quantitative analysis of capital structure decisions (debt versus equity) and debt structure decisions (fixed-rate debt versus floating-rate debt or inflation-linked debt) in a continuous-time setting. We show that optimizing the debt structure has an impact on capital structure decisions, and leads to increases in leverage ratios compared to a pure fixed-rate debt program. We also find that for realistic parameter values, jointly optimizing the debt and capital structures generates a significant increase in firm value with respect to a situation where only the capital structure is optimized.