公司融资讲义

TOPIC 5: CAPITAL STRUCTURE AND THE PRODUCT MARKET
1. Introduction
Traditionally, the strategy of the firm in the product market and its financial strategy were studied in
isolation: the industrial organization literature that studies the strategies of the firm in the product market,
has ignored the financial structure of the firm, while the corporate finance literature that studies the
financial strategies of the firm in the capital market has ignored the strategies of the firm in the product
market. Specifically, the maintained assumption in industrial organization literature is that firms are allequity,
and the maintained assumption in the corporate finance literature is that the earnings of firms come
from a black-box and are represented by some prespecified distribution. Recently, a small but growing
literature has emerged which tries to bridge this gap and explore the interaction between these two
literatures. In this chapter we shall review the main contributions to this literature and we shall see that
this new literature has uncovered interesting and important linkages between financial strategies and
competitive strategies. This suggests that one cannot study the financial and "real" aspects of the firm’s
operations in isolation as this approach involves a serious loss of insights