A Estrutura de Capital das PME: evidência no mercado português

• Autor(a) principal: Vieira, Elisabete S.
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Outros Autores: Novo, António João
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/ei.v0i2.6505

The capital structure of companies has been, in last decades, one of the main topics of corporate finance. Since the paper published by Modiglianni and Miller (1958), several empirical studies and theories have been applied in this field, initially, applied to large companies, and now applied also to the population of SMEs.This study investigates the capital structure of Portuguese SMEs, and analyse whether business practices allow you to validate the arguments offered by the financial theories that explain the capital structure.Based on a sample of balanced panel data for the period between 2000 and 2005, our results indicate that the theory that best explain the behaviour of SMEs in what concerns its capital structure is the Pecking Order Theory. Firms prefer internal financing. If this is not enough and external financing becomes necessary, they issue risk-free debt, and gradually move up the scale of risk debt. Lastly, the company issues equity.