Tài liệu Journal of Applied Corporate Finance

University
8
STERN STEWART JOURNAL OF APPLIED CORPORATE FINANCE
HOW DO CFOS MAKE
CAPITAL BUDGETING
AND CAPITAL STRUCTURE
DECISIONS?
by John Graham and
Campbell Harvey,
Duke University*
e recently conducted a comprehensive survey that analyzed the
current practice of corporate finance, with particular focus on the
areas of capital budgeting and capital structure. The survey results
enabled us to identify aspects of corporate practice that are
*This paper is a compressed version of our paper that was first published as “The Theory and Practice of Corporate Finance:
Evidence from the Field” in the Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 60 (2001), pp. 187-243. This research is partially sponsored
by the Financial Executives International (FEI) but the opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of
FEI. We thank the FEI executives who responded to the survey. Graham acknowledges financial support from the Alfred P.
Sloan Research Foundation.
1. In the original JFE version of this paper, we show that our sample of respondents is representative of the overall
population of 4,400 firms, is fairly representative of Compustat firms, and is not adversely affected by nonresponse bias. The
next largest survey that we know of studies 298 large firms and is presented in J. Moore and A. Reichert, “An Analysis of the
Financial Management Techniques Currently Employed by Large U.S. Corporations,” Journal of Business Finance and
Accounting, Vol. 10 (1983), pp. 623-645.
consistent with finance theory, as well as aspects that are hard to reconcile with
what we teach in our business schools today. In presenting these results, we
hope that some practitioners will find it worthwhile to observe how other
companies operate and perhaps modify their own practices. It may also be useful
for finance academics to consider differences between theory and practice as
a reason to revisit the theory.
We solicited responses from approximately 4,440 companies and received
392 completed surveys, representing a wide variety of firms and industries.1 The
survey contained nearly 100 questions and explored both capital budgeting and
capital structure decisions in depth. The responses to these questions enabled
us to explore whether and how these corporate policies are interrelated. For
example, we investigated whether companies that made more aggressive use
of debt financing also tended to use more sophisticated capital budgeting
techniques, perhaps because of their greater need for discipline and precision
in the corporate investment process.
More generally, the design of our survey allowed for a richer understanding
of corporate decision-making by analyzing the CFOs’ responses in
the context of various company characteristics, such as size, P/E ratio,
leverage, credit rating, dividend policy, and industry. We also looked for
systematic relationships between corporate financial choices and managerial
factors, such as the extent of top management’s stock ownership, and
the age, tenure, and education of the CEO. By testing whether the responses