Made available in DSpace on 2010-04-20T20:51:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 98468.pdf.jpg: 15556 bytes, checksum: 82354d9e302b0f5851ce3c9150147d2f (MD5) 98468.pdf: 841055 bytes, checksum: d3f59690cddbb38713e374ee903838c6 (MD5) 98468.pdf.txt: 263196 bytes, checksum: 5c0fa64209b55216a17821d5d4e86f3a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2004-04-15T00:00:00Z / Este trabalho analisa a abordagem oportunista nas decisões de financiamento, buscando evidências desse comportamento nas empresas brasileiras. O oportunismo sugere que o administrador escolha as fontes de recursos economicamente mais vantajosas no momento da decisão, não se preocupando com uma hierarquia de captação de fundos, ou com a manutenção de um nível de endividamento ótimo. As evidências empíricas apontam para a existência de oportunismo na escolha das fontes de financiamento e influência de fatores macroeconômicos na determinação do nível de endividamento. / We analyze the windows of opportunity theory in capital structure decisions, searching for evidences on this behaviour in Brazillian publicly held companies. The opportunistic approach suggests that managers make their capital structure choices based on economic advantages offered by each source of funds. That means, managers do not follow a pecking order nor a target adjustment model. Empirical evidences points to managerial opportunism behaviour in the financing decisions and strong macroeconomic factors influence on leverage. Public debt from Government competes with companies for sources of funds; interest rate and stock market liquidity are negatively related to leverage.

The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the closure of these aforementioned research gaps. Answering these calls, the following research objectives are proposed: 1. Understanding the main factors that have an influence on the capital structure decision of firms. 2. Understanding how the capital structure of firms differs among various industries and to fathom cross-sectional differences in the importance of debt determinants among industries. 3. Investigating the influence of time on the capital structure decision of firms. In specific, it must be found out whether certain debt determinants alter their effect on the capital structure decision of firms over time. 4. Studying the market-timing effect of debt financing. It must be researched how managers time the debt market when engaging in bond or loan issues. 5. Empirically proving how stylized factors and market-timing behaviour influences the transaction of equity, bond and loan issues as well as of share repurchases. 6. Finally, discussing how far the stylized facts can be explained by existing capital structure theory in order to crown the theory, whose notion can best account the observed financing patterns across the world.