The shareholder value maximization is the keystone of the actual stage of capitalism. The objective function of publicly quoted corporations is nowadays the maximization of the shareholders' wealth, i.e. the sum of dividends and capital gains. Despite the increasing international financial...

In this paper the authors survey capital structure theories, from the start-up point, which is considered Modigliani and Miller’s capital structure irrelevance theorem, to recent theories, such as the pecking order and the market timing theory. For each t