This study investigates the determinants of changes in corporate ownership and firm failure, taking into account different types of sellers and buyers of control blocks. For a large panel of German corporations we find that firms are more likely to fail or to be sold when performance is poor,...

This study provides new stylized facts on the determinants of corporate failure and acquisition in Germany. It also offers important lessons for the design of empirical studies. We show that firms experiencing failure or acquisition are significantly different from surviving firms on a number of...

We analyze the treatment and impact of idiosyncratic or firm-specific risk in regulation. Regulatory authorities regularly ignore firm-specific characteristics, such as size or asset ages, implying different risk exposure in incentive regulation. In contrast, it is common to apply only a single...

This paper studies the influence of the benefits of control on the capital structure and the growth of private companies for a sample of 8,964 UK companies with limited liability observed for up to 5 years. It is hypothesised that companies in which existing owners would lose more control if...

This paper documents that standard cross-sectional determinants of firm leverage also apply to the capital structure of large banks in the United States and Europe. We find a remarkable consistency in sign, significance and economic magnitude. Like non-financial firms, banks appear to have...

This paper studies the influence of the private benefits of control on the capital structure and the growth of private companies. It is argued that companies in which existing owners would lose more control if they expanded, have smaller equity increases, are more highly levered and grow more...

This paper incorporates the cost of adjustment between observed and optimal leverage in explaining the variation in firm?s equity or bank-debt financing investments. Using a dynamic adjustment approach identifies the determinants to capital structure between different financial systems. In...

This paper identifies the entrepreneur's exposure to idiosyncratic risk as an important determinant of the demand for loans and the capital structure. The analysis is based on a sample of small and medium-sized private companies from the United States. The exposure to idiosyncratic risk is...

This paper empirically analyses whether both personal and corporate taxation have an impact on companies' capital structure decisions. We investigate the effect of the difference in taxation of debt and equity financing on capital structures. Our empirical results, based on a comprehensive panel...

This paper analyzes the impact of taxes and lending conditions on the financial structure of multinationals? foreign affiliates. The empirical analysis employs a large panel of affiliates of German multinationals in 26 countries in the period from 1996 until 2003. In accordance with the...