Financing structure of African enterprises: real choice or real constraint?

Description

The work of Modigliani & Miller (1958, 1963) initiated a vast stream of research, both theoretical and empirical, in the field of the study of corporate financing choices. From a theoretical point of view, three theories dominate the question of the financing structure of companies: the Tradeoff Theory, the Pecking Order Theory and the theory of market timing.
The empirical literature is, for its part, very abundant with a plethora of quantitative studies attempting, most of the time, to achieve a double objective. On the one hand, this empirical research attempts to identify the factors internal and external to the company that are likely to influence their financing choices and, on the other hand, this research attempts to shed light on the explanatory and predictive capacity of the financing choices of the three theories mentioned above.
However, more than sixty years after Modigliani & Miller’s seminal article (1958) and despite the many empirical studies on the question of financing choices, it must be said that this question still remains without a unanimous response from the scientific community. Indeed, no real consensus seems to emerge from the empirical studies on this subject, as they vary greatly in time and space. There is one region that is particularly forgotten in empirical studies, and that is Africa and more specifically Sub-Saharan Africa. This doctoral thesis project therefore aims to shed light on the problem of financing African companies in the Sub-Saharan context.
This project will be based mainly on quantitative approaches, but the implementation of a qualitative approach cannot be excluded either.