This study examines how family firm characteristics affect capital structure decisions. In our analysis we disentangle the influence of three distinct components of a family firm: ownership, supervisory and management board activities by the founding family. Thereby, we use a unique panel...

I show that ownership by blockholding and board composition is an important determinant ofcorporate debt maturity structure. Using GMM methodology to control for the potential endogeneityof all regressors, I find a statistically and economically significant negative relation between...

This paper uses German evidence to address two questions about corporate governance. Theeffects of ownership on corporate governance have received much recent attention, but verylittle of this has been devoted to the appropriate way to measure firm ownership. The resultsof this paper show that...

Building on the ‘law and economics’ literature, this paper analyses corporategovernance implications of debt financing in an environment where a dominant owner isable to extract ex ante ‘private benefits of control’. Ownership concentration may result inlower efficiency, measured as a...

Even 50 years after Modigliani/Miller’s irrelevance theorem, the basic question of how firmschoose their capital structure remains unclear. This survey paper aims at summarizing anddiscussing corresponding recent developments in empirical capital structure research, which,in our view, are...

This paper studies conservative debt policies, focusing on firms with no debt (zeroleverage)or with extremely low debt. Examining an unbalanced panel of U.K. firms,we show that debt conservatism is a common, persistent yet puzzling empiricalregularity: nearly 10% of U.K. firms have zero leverage...

We study the eect of the business cycle on optimal capital structure choice and thebenet to leverage. We propose a regime switching model with a state-dependentcash ow process to capture macroeconomic risk in a rm's cash ow. Our modelis parsimonious but still realistic and allows for a wide...

Seit zwanzig Jahren befaßt sich die Finanzmarktforschung einerseits mit Fragen der Bewertung und des Managements von Finanztiteln auf effizienten Kapitalmärkten und mit Fragen der Managementkontrolle auf unvollkommenen Märkten. Der folgende selektive Überblick konzentriert sich auf zentrale...

Zur Finanzierung von Investitionsvorhaben sind Unternehmen im allgemeinen auf die Zuführung von Kapital durch externe Kapitalgeber angewiesen. Finanzierungsbeziehungen zwischen den Unternehmen als Nachfrager nach Kapital und den Investoren als Anbieter von Kapital können grundsätzlich auf...

This paper discusses whether, in which respects, and to what extent the corporate governancesystems of Germany, the United Kingdom and France have already converged in the course ofEuropean economic integration, or are likely to converge in the foreseeable future. Wepresent, and attempt to...