Corporate Capital Structures in the United States

The research reported in this volume represents the second stage of a wide-ranging National Bureau of Economic Research effort to investigate "The Changing Role of Debt and Equity in Financing US Capital Formation." The first group of studies sponsored under this project, which have been published individually and summarized in a 1982 volume bearing the same title (Friedman 1982), addressed several key issues relevant to corporate sector behavior along with such other aspects of the evolving financial underpinnings of U.S. capital formation as household saving incentives, international capital flows, and government debt management. In the project’s second series of studies, presented at the National Bureau of Economic Research conference in January 1983 and published here for the first time along with commentaries from that conference, the central focus is the financial side of capital formation undertaken by the US corporate business sector. At the same time, because corporations’ securities must be held, a parallel focus is on the behavior of the markets that price these claims.