This paper analyses the effect of bank relationships on the interest rate and personaland real guarantees borne by a sample of small and medium-sized enterprises in theirindebtedness. The results of this paper indicate that the SMEs that work with fewer financialintermediaries obtain debt at a...

The management of a life insurance portfolio or pension fund must take intoaccount the temporal evolution of its liabilities and its assets through some variables:the factors and returns. Their behaviour is analysed statistically and we deduce it to avector error correction model (VECM). Using...

In any pension system based on capitalization, affiliates have to cover certain explicit costs which in a pay-as-you-go system would be implicit. In this paper we set out a model based on Whitehouse (2000) and Diamond (1999) to enable the explicit costs borne by the affiliate both during his...

This paper analyzes changes in capital structure behavior in a sample of Spanish venture capital (VC) backed companies that may occur after a VC investment due to the certification effect provided by VC investors. Our results show significant changes in determinants such as tangibility, size and...

This paper examines whether Working Capital Management (WCM) is sensitive to market imperfections such as asymmetric information, agency conflicts or financial distress. We find that firms have a target investment in working capital and that they take decisions in order to achieve this. In...

In this paper, we explore two of the most relevant theories that explain financial policy in small and medium enterprises (SMEs): pecking order theory and trade-off theory. Panel data methodology is used to test the empirical hypotheses over a sample of 6482 Spanish SMEs during the five-year...

This paper investigates the relationship between board of directors¿characteristics and firm value. We find a positive relationship between board ofdirectors¿ shareholdings and Tobin¿s Q. Endogenous treatment of these variables alsoreveals a positive relationship between Tobin¿s Q and board...

This paper examines the effect of accruals subjectivity on the way investors use the information contained in accruals to set the interest rates charged in debt contracts. To measure the degree of subjectivity involved in the estimation of accruals we use several indicators of their ex ante...

The objective of this work is to analyse the factors motivating firms to follow a conservative (or low-leverage) financial policy over several years. We carry out a study on a sample of 1,396 Spanish firms in the period 1993-2001. Using logit regression and various difference of means analyses,...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether some of the empirical implications of the Berger and Udell's (1998) financial growth cycle hold. We use a sample of 22.842 observations for year 2003 and test several hypothesis through MANOVA analysis. Results show that companies tend to have...