Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 1,101

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 3 of the 3 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Choice Between Equity and Debt: An Empirical Study

MARSH, PAUL·1982·The Journal of Finance

Abstract

This empirical study of security issues by UK companies between 1959 and 1974 focuses on how companies select between financing instruments at a given point in time. It throws light on a number of interesting questions. First, it demonstrates that companies are heavily influenced by market conditions and the past history of security prices in choosing between debt and equity. Second, it provides evidence that companies appear to make their choice of financing instrument as if they have target levels of debt in mind. Finally, the results are consistent with the notion that these target debt levels are themselves a function of company size, bankruptcy risk, and asset composition.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1982.tb01099.x

Cites

3 of 3 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 3 references

Research works printed but not linked: 46

  1. 10.2307/2330205 · DOI
  2. R.Ball P.Brown andF. J.Finn.“Share Capitalization Changes New Information and the Australian Equity Market.” Paper presented at the 1977 Conference of the Accounting Association of Australia and New Zealand. · doi:10.1177/031289627700200202
  3. 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1967.tb02975.x · DOI · Paper page
  4. 10.2307/1926290 · doi:10.2307/1926290
  5. Bodenhammer L., 1968, The Effect of the Size of Public Offerings of Common Stocks upon Pre‐Offering Stock Prices.”
  6. 10.2307/2534224 · DOI
  7. Bray J. N., 1967, The Risk and Use of Debt Financing.”
  8. 10.2307/1935879 · doi:10.2307/1935879
  9. 10.2307/2326759 · doi:10.2307/2326759
  10. 10.1111/j.1468-5957.1976.tb00477.x · doi:10.1111/j.1468-5957.1976.tb00477.x
  11. 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1977.tb01990.x · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.1977.tb01990.x
  12. Chudson W. A., 1945, The Pattern of Corporate Financial Structure
  13. 10.1086/259710 · doi:10.1086/259710
  14. Donaldson G., 1961, Corporate Debt Capacity: A Study of Corporate Debt Policy and the Determination of Corporate Debt Capacity
  15. Farrar D., 1967, Taxes, Corporate Policy and Returns to Investors, National Tax Journal, 20, 444, 10.1086/NTJ41791571 · DOI · Paper page
  16. 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1979.tb02130.x · DOI · Paper page
  17. Gordon M. J., 1962, The Investment, Financing and Valuation of the Corporation
  18. Gupta M. C., 1969, The Effect of Size, Growth and Industry on the Financial Structure of Manufacturing Companies, Journal of Finance, 24, 517
  19. Jensen M. C., 1977, Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure, Journal of Financial Economics, 3, 305, 10.1016/0304-405X(76)90026-X · DOI · Paper page
  20. 10.2307/2489971 · doi:10.2307/2489971
  21. 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1975.tb03161.x · DOI
  22. Marsh P. R., 1977, An Analysis of Equity Rights Issues on the London Stock Exchange.”
  23. 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1979.tb03439.x · DOI · Paper page
  24. 10.2307/3664932 · doi:10.2307/3664932
  25. Modigliani F., 1958, The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance and the Theory of Investment, American Economic Review, 48, 261
  26. Modigliani F., 1963, Corporate Income Taxes and the Cost of Capital: A Correction, American Economic Review, 53, 433
  27. 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2004.00692.x · DOI · Paper page
  28. 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1974.tb03072.x · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.1974.tb03072.x
  29. Remmers L., 1975, Industry and Size as Debt Ratio Determinants in Manufacturing Internationally, Financial Management, 3, 24, 10.2307/3665286 · DOI · Paper page
  30. 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1964.tb02867.x · DOI
  31. Schmidt R., 1976, European Finance Association 1975 Proceedings
  32. 10.1086/295444 · DOI · Paper page
  33. 10.2307/3665143 · DOI
  34. Scott D. F., 1976, Industry Influence on Financial Structure, Financial Management, 4
  35. Schwarz E., 1967, Some Surrogate Evidence in Support of the Concept of Optimal Capital Structure, Journal of Finance, 22, 10
  36. 10.1016/0304-405X(77)90040-X · DOI · Paper page
  37. Smithers J., 1977, London Share Price Database.”
  38. Solnik B. H., 1975, Eurobonds: Determinants of the Demand for Capital and the International Interest Rate Structure, Journal of Bank Research
  39. 10.2307/1935900 · DOI
  40. Theil H., 1971, Principles of Econometrics
  41. 10.2307/2329684 · DOI · Paper page
  42. Horne J. C., 1977, Financial Management and Policy
  43. 10.2307/2326766 · DOI · Paper page
  44. White R. W., 1974, The Probability of Bankruptcy for American Industrial Firms.”
  45. 10.2307/2978828 · DOI
  46. Whittington G., 1975, Computer File of UK Quoted Companies' Accounts: 1948–71.”

Cited by

See all 1,101

Metadata

Authors
MARSH, P.
Venue
The Journal of Finance
Publisher
Wiley
Published
1982-03
Volume
37
Issue
1
Pages
121-144
ISSN
  • 0022-1082 (ISSN-L)
  • 1540-6261
OpenAlex
W2138593640
Cited by
1,101
References
3
FWCI
31.28
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Choice Between Equity and Debt: An Empirical Study. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1982.tb01099.x
The paper
MARSH, P. (1982). The Choice Between Equity and Debt: An Empirical Study. The Journal of Finance. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1982.tb01099.x

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.