Marco conceptual de las teorías de la irrelevancia, del trade-off y de la jerarquía de las preferencias

through an exposition that does not aim at being exhaustive this article exposes the conceptual framework of three dominant theories of capital structure in the financial field: irrelevance theory, trade-off theory and the hierarchy of preferences theory. even though the postulates of these theories -specially in the case of the irrelevance theory- have been widely spread, these pages display other foundational aspects conceived by the same creator of the theories. beyond being opposed by their conception of an optimal capital structure, the preferences theory and the trade-off theory can work in a complementary way, giving privilege to a preference scale and evaluating the cost-benefit relation whenever doubts on preference hierarchies appear.