Capital Structures of US Market Firms and Its Determinants During Different Macroeconomic States and Various Leverage Levels

The Capital structure and its determinants have been in the sight of econometric scientific community for some time now. More and more research studies have focused in the adjustment speed of debt ratio to the targeted debt ratio levels under various macroeconomic and firm factors. The problem we would like to consider is the power and the direction of the effects of different firm specific and macroeconomic factors that influence the Total Debt Ratio the Long Debt Ratio and the Short debt ratio in regular and during crisis periods on a dataset of US firms. Instead of just looking averages we want to spectate what these effects are for firms that have low, medium and high Debt Ratios. This is succeeded by looking along the distribution or quantiles of the dependent variable of our partial adjustment model. The findings about the long debt ratio adjustment speed for low leveraged firms is that is not only slowed down but also with bigger pace in crisis periods than is slowed for higher leveraged firms. The TDR and SHDR seem rather unaffected from crisis. The firm specific and macro-economic variable is affecting differently low medium and large leveraged firm although in a secondary role