Over the course of the past twenty years, venture capital has fuelled an entrepreneurial revolution - first in the United States and now in Europe's common market -, which has opened new opportunities for technological innovation, capital investment and employment growth. Some of the most...

By using short-term direct finance firms of the highest credit quality expose themselves to rollover risk in the public debt markets. Firms insure themselves against this risk by securing backup lines of credit from banks that they may use should market liquidity dry up. In a first step, this...

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...

We consider the provision of venture capital in a dynamic agency model. In particular, we focus on the interaction between venture capital financing and product market competition: A young firm with a risky innovation project attempts to enter a market where it faces two periods of price...

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...

Market liquidity is the ease of trading an asset. Its risk is the potential loss, because a security can only be traded at high or prohibitive costs. While the omnipresence and importance of market liquidity is widely acknowledged, it has long remained a more or less elusive concept. Treatment...

In verschiedenen Modellwelten wird untersucht, ob und inwieweit Kreditrationierung und Risikovermeidung oder -übernahme durch Kreditgeber bei rationalem Verhalten aller Beteiligten erklärt werden kann. Ausgehend von der Erkenntnis, daß auch in einer durch Informationsasymmetrie geprägten...

This paper analyzes optimal incentive compatible debt contracts when lenders are risk averse. The decisive factor in this regard is that risk aversion requiresto consider further sources of risk the lenders are exposed to. The main resultsderived in a setting of asymmetric information – the...

This paper studies optimal risk-taking and information disclosure by firms that obtain financing from both a 'relationship' bank and 'arm's-length' banks. We find that firm decisions are asymmetrically influenced by the degree of heterogeneity among banks: lowly-collateralized firms vary optimal...

We derive the effects of credit risk transfer (CRT) markets on real sector productivity and on the volume of financial intermediation in a model where banks choose their optimal degree of CRT and monitoring. We find that CRT increases productivity in the up-market real sector but decreases it in...