There are no stylized facts about the capital structure of small firms. Therefore, in this paper I use firm data from 10 Western European countries to contrast the sources of leverage across small and large firms. Specifically, I jointly evaluate the explanatory power of firm-specific, country...

This study explores the significance of firm-specific, institutional, and macroeconomic factors in explaining variation in leverage using a sample of firms from nine Eastern European countries. Country-specific factors are the main determinants of variation in leverage for small unlisted...

The choice of capital structure by firms is a fundamental issue in financial literature. According to a recent finding, the capital structure of firms remains almost unchanged during their lives meaning that leverage ratios are significantly stable over time. The stability of leverage ratios is...

The paper examines the importance of financial constraints for firm capital structure decisions in transitions economies during 1996-2006 using endogenous switching regression with unknown sample separation approach. The evidence suggests that differences in financing constraints have a...

We investigate experimentally the conjecture that loss avoidance solves the tension in stag-hunt games for which payoff dominance and risk dominance make conflicting predictions. Contrary to received textbook wisdom, money-losing outcomes do shift behavior, albeit not strongly, toward the...

We use a panel of Czech firms to enhance existing literature where the dependent variable is foreign ownership. In our estimation, we control for endogeneity and unobserved effects using standard methods complemented by tests for heterogenous Granger-causality. We also model foreign ownership as...

I explore the effect of a bank's failure on its client firms using the 1998 bankruptcy of a middle-sized Estonian bank.I compare the performance of firms receiving credit from the bankrupt bank to that of a randomly selected set of firms between 1996 and 2000.I find the client firms to be less...

We examine whether financial systems facilitate efficient allocation of resources into perspective projects. Employing European micro-level data from 1996-2005, we show that firms in industries with the best growth opportunities use more external finance in financially more developed countries....