Financial Crises and Capital Structure Decisions: Empirical Evidence from Emerging Markets

This study analyzes emerging market firms’ capital structure decisions. We select the reference as 2007–2008 financial crisis and study the temporal behavior. We investigate if EM firms differ in decisions of issuing debt and equity and if their responses to the global financial crisis are explicable with the existing theories. Our findings suggest that the crisis behavior of EM firms is not fully conformable with the extant theories. Their debt and equity reversals are antithetical, that is in the reverse direction from the last extreme point, driving a pattern to stagger between substantial debt issues followed by equity expansions.