 Product–market flexibility and capital structureSudipto Sarkar The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2014, vol. 54, issue 1, 111-122 Abstract: Many companies have the ability to adjust their product's price and/or quantity in response to changes in the marketplace. We show that this product–market flexibility or market power, hitherto ignored in the contingent-claim modeling literature, can potentially have a significant effect on the corporate capital structure decision. When the firm is operating at full capacity, product–market flexibility is not important, hence market power has a negligible effect on optimal capital structure. However, when operating below capacity, product–market flexibility becomes important and market power has, in general, a positive effect on optimal debt level and optimal leverage ratio. This is consistent with available empirical evidence. Numerical results indicate that the effect of product–market flexibility on optimal debt level and optimal leverage ratio can potentially be large enough to be economically significant, hence it should not be ignored as a determinant of capital structure. Keywords: Product–market flexibility; Price sensitivity; Capital structure; Contingent-claim model (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:quaeco:v:54:y:2014:i:1:p:111-122 DOI: 10.1016/j.qref.2013.09.002 Access Statistics for this article The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance is currently edited by R. J. Arnould and J. E. Finnerty More articles in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance from Elsevier |
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