Existing research demonstrates that corporate financing decisions influence the cash-flow rights and control rights of the securities issued by companies differently and that the same corporate capital structures and/or ownership patterns have diverse effects and aims across countries, especially when emerging countries are analysed. The 1research purpose of this investigation is to understand how corporate financing decisions are affected by ownership structure in emerging countries. For this purpose, two game-theoretic models are developed and an empirical test is carried out. The first theoretical model analyses a number of key factors inducing a separation of ownership and control in emerging countries. This model argues that large private benefits of control, extreme risk, low investor protection, inefficient capital markets, and governments sympathetic to incumbent management at the expense of outside investors are factors contributing to create a separation of ownership and control in emerging markets. The second model examines the positive side of network creation through the analysis of the interaction of empathy and economic gains. This model identifies important factors promoting the formation of business groups in emerging countries. The empirical study is a two-fold analysis. Firstly, it tests the effects of well-known determinants of capital structure on debt; secondly, the effects of ownership and control in the financial policies of emerging countries are analysed. To do so, corporate financial data and firm-level data of Mexican publicly traded companies for was gathered. As expected, asset tangibility, company size, profitability and market to book ratio proved to be important firm-specific capital structure determinants, similar to the case of developed countries. Business risk and effective tax rate are key firm-specific capital structure determinants, as emerging markets research has identified. The two factors proposed by this researcher, viz. consolidation and liquidity are significant in the determination of capital structure of the Mexican publicly traded companies. Further, almost two thirds of Mexican publicly traded companies are family controlled. When families are large shareholders, they favour debt financing; whereas when families are the majority controlling shareholder they prefer issue shares, the latter supports the risk management argument proposed by Hagelin et al. (2006) and Céspedes et al. (2010)