Equal Access and Miller's Equilibrium

Controversy over the implications of debt and the rationale belying capital structure has seemingly come to rest upon a plateau defined by Miller's equilibrium analysis of aggregate corporate debt [10]. In “Debt and Taxes,†Miller reasserts his contention that whether capital is obtained through debt or equity has no bearing on the market value of the firm and is, therefore, irrelevant--a notion which has long been accepted with some reluctance by the finance academe. When the Modigliani-Miller model was first offered some 20 years ago [11], it was accompanied by a set of assumptions which portrayed the world of corporate finance in such malleable terms as to make the irrelevancy propositions palatable. Adaptation of this theoretical model (by its originators) to its secular counterpart through the imposition of corporate taxes [12] brought about a reassuring reversal of the irrelevancy doctrine, but left in its stead the disconcerting prescription to maximize firm value by financing exclusively via debt. Consideration of tax effects at the personal level by Farrar and Selwyn [7] marked the next concession to reality by capital structure theorists. Instead of alienating the original model still further from observed corporate behavior, this step provided a means of reconciling the overwhelming advantage of debt financing at the corporate level with the ultimate after-tax “consumption possibilities†afforded to individual investors. Miller's analysis explains that corporations are forced to “gross up†nominal interest rates to attract bondholders who must be compensated for their personal tax liability [10]. Potential increases in market value due to the taxdeductibility of interest payments are exhausted in the competitive drive toward equilibrium—at which point there are no gains from leverage. The sanctity of the irrelevance theorem thus appears to have been restored at the aggregate level.