Capital Structure as an Investment Decision

This paper treats a firm's capital structure decision as an optimal risk taking decision based on its risk-return tradeoff prospect. The paper proposes to construct mean-variance ratio forecasts based on return-on-asset histories and shows that the forecasts can explain a large proportion of the cross-sectional company leverage variation. The leverage predicted by the mean-variance ratio forecast maximizes a firm’s relative value. Once the mean-variance ratio forecast is accounted for, contributions from other commonly identified variables become small. Furthermore, some of the additional explained variations do not constitute value-maximizing leverage target variations, but rather variations away from the target