Empirical Research In The Impact Of Financing Environment On Capital Structure

Due to the capital structure optimization has profound significance to the corporate governance and the enterprise value, the capital structure is the hotspots of research. Foreign scholars pointed out that the research on the choice of capital structure under the condition of the changing external environment will be the future research direction of capital structure. And other foreign scholars have demonstrated that the asset specificity is an important factor of the capital structure in theoretical and empirical studies. But there is lack of empirical research in the impact of the external environment and asset specificity on capital structure in domestic studies. Therefore, this paper will base on the previous studies, and do some exploratory research in the impact of the external financing environment and the asset specificity on capital structure. Based on 440 listed companies as the research object, this paper constructed fiveexternal financing environmental indicators, including the rate of inflation, the growth rate of GDP, the degree of the credit funds distribution marketization, the rate of securitization, the degree of the openness in financial markets; one asset specificity indicator, the proportion of sales expenses to main income; and six enterprise's status indicators, including the scale of enterprise, the growth of enterprise, the tax shields, the value of asset collateral, the degree of ownership balance and the proportion of state ownership. Considering except the enterprise's status indicators involves in this paper, there are some unobserved difference among the different enterprises. And the fixed effects or random effects of the panel data model can be well depict the differences of unobserved factors among the different individual, therefore, this paper well analysis the relationships among the indicators by building panel data model.Research results show that the financing environment has important impact on capital structure. In the external financing environment, the rate of inflation, the growth rate GDP and the rate of securitization have significant negative influence on capital structure; the degree of the credit funds distribution marketization and the degree of the openness in financial markets have significant positive impact on for capital structure. At the same time, the enterprise asset specificity has significantly positive impact on capital structure. In addition, the enterprise's own status has an important influence on capital structure, but the degree of ownership balance has non-significant positive impact on capital structure. After analysis the impact of the indicators on capital structure, this paper also had test the stability of the empirical results, and the study conclusion obtained certain reliability.Finally, to the results of empirical research, this paper puts forward some suggestion for enterprise's financing decision.