In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy?as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance...

Micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in developing countries are typically considered to be severely credit constrained. Additionally, high business risks may partly explain why the capital stocks of MSEs remain low. This article analyzes the determinants of the capital stocks of MSEs in poor...

This paper investigates whether financial obstacles, and, more generally, financial pressure faced by firms, significantly affect firm growth. For this purpose, we use an unbalanced panel of about 1,000,000 observations for around 155,000 non-financial corporations in five euro area countries....

To gain insights about the quality of board's firing decisions, we investigate abnormal stock returns and operating performance around CEO-turnover announcements in a new hand- collected sample of 208 “clean” turnover events between January 1998 and June 2009. Unlike the majority of previous...

This paper analyzes the relationship of ownership concentration and firm performance in the context of different institutional environments in 28 Central and Eastern European transition economies. Using the BEEPS data for the period from 2002 to 2009 we find an inverted u-shaped relation of...

Using recently collected data on Finnish small businesses, we provide evidence that the debt capacity of growth options, defined as the amount of debt that firms optimally raise for an incremental project, is negative, especially in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. We...

In this paper we study the relation between firm-level disclosure quality and the availability of external finance to firms. Using data on Finnish firms that are mostly private and small, we first estimate ‘excess growth’ made possible by external finance. We then show that the excess growth...