This study explores individual and country-level environmental drivers of informal “seed” investment. We examine four types of informal investors based on business ownership experience (or no such experience) and close family relationship with investee (or no such relationship): “classic love...

A widely recognized paper by Colin Mayer (1988) has led to a profound revision of academic thinking about financing patterns of corporations in different countries. Using flow-of-funds data instead of balance sheet data, Mayer and others who followed his lead found that internal financing is the...

What determines the firm's choice of its mechanism of investment financing? How is the choice of the firm's financing mechanism at the micro level related to the economy's business cycle movements at the aggregate level? This paper develops a model of the credit market where the equilibrium...