BHP Billiton is the world's largest resources company, although it is a relatively new global corporation having been assembled from the merger of BHP Ltd, a large Australian mining and steel manufacturing company, and Billiton PIc, a UK-listed company with extensive mining histories in southern...

This article analyses the economics of financing banking supervision and attempts to respond to two questions: What are the most common financing practices? Can the differences in current financing practices be explained by country specific factors? We perform an empirical analysis that...