Capital Structure Decisions in Institutional Buyouts: Entrepreneurship

Characteristics of institutional buyouts (IBOs)Overview of corporate finance theories, the trade-off between taxes and financial distress, capital structure and agency conflictsIBO financing layersHypothesis of IBO capital structures and operationalisation of variablesEmpirical results on IBO capital structures

Dr. Christian Kühn promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Malte Brettel am Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftswissenschaften für Ingenieure und Naturwissenschaftler der RWTH Aachen. Er ist als Manager im Bereich Leveraged Finance/Structured Finance bei der HSH Nordbank AG in Hamburg tätig.

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.