In this paper we analyze how a firm might protect quasi-rents in an environmentof imperfect capital markets, where switching lenders is costly to the borrower, andcontracts are incomplete. As switching costs make the firm vulnerable to ex-postexploitation, it may want to diversify lending in...

Financial theory creates a puzzle. Some authors argue that high-risk entrepreneurs choose debt contracts instead of equity contracts since risky but high returns are of relatively more value for a loan-financed firm. On the contrary, authors who focus explicitly on start-up finance predict that...

We estimate firms' cash flow sensitivity of cash to empirically test how the financial system's structure and activity level influence their financial constraints. For this purpose we merge Almeida, Campello and Weisbach (2004), a pathbreaking new design for evaluating a firm's financial...

Using the 2007 Mannheim innovation survey, we investigate whether family firms are more financially constrained than other firms and how this affects both innovation input as well as innovation outcomes such as market and firm novelties or process innovations. Based on the CDM framework,...

Financial theory creates a puzzle. Some authors argue that high-risk entrepreneurs choose debt contracts instead of equity contracts since risky but high returns are of relatively more value for a loan-financed firm. Conversely, authors who focus explicitly on start-up finance predict that...

The paper investigates the motives of activity (entry and exit) of Private Equity (PE) investors in European companies. Investment of a PE firm is not viewed unambiguously. First, it is claimed that PE investment is made for the sake of seeking shortterm gains by taking control and utilizing the...

The paper investigates the link between bank concentration and a country's buyout market. We perform a macro level analysis for 15 European countries during 1997-2007. We estimate the elasticity of the country i's buyout market to country i's concentration in the banking sector. Our major...

The paper investigates how Private Equity (PE) ownership influences out-performance of a high-growth firm, and whether it differs from the effect of two other important types of financial investors: banks and non-bank financial firms. We transform the levered return on equity into a unlevered...