The study provides a brief summary of the theoretical and empirical considerations related to the possible determinants of firm growth. With a special focus on small and medium-sized firms, we investigate the role of the availability of internal and external finance. After examining the key...

This paper examines the interplay between the real and financial decisions of the competitive firm under output price uncertainty. The firm faces additional sources of uncertainty that are aggregated into a background risk. We show that the firm always chooses its optimal debt-equity ratio to...

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....

Our empirical literature review shows that little is known about how firm performance changes with age, presumably because of the paucity of data on firm age. For Spanish manufacturing firms, we analyse the firm performance related to firm age between 1998 and 2006. We find evidence that firms...

This paper studies the influence of the private benefits of control on the capital structure and the growth of private companies. It is argued that companies in which existing owners would lose more control if they expanded, have smaller equity increases, are more highly levered and grow more...

This paper studies the influence of the benefits of control on the capital structure and the growth of private companies for a sample of 8,964 UK companies with limited liability observed for up to 5 years. It is hypothesised that companies in which existing owners would lose more control if...

The objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that in particular financially constrained firms lease a higher share of their assets to mitigate problems of asymmetric information. The assumptions are tested under a GMM framework which simultaneously controls for endogeneity problems and...

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...