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 study is an empirical attempt to investigate the effects of balance sheet deterioration of Japanese firms and banks during the 1990s on credit allocation using the Short-term Economic Survey of Enterprises. This survey includes a unique item: the proportion of firms perceiving the lending...

Using data from Germany this paper examines the direct effect of non-financial firms' use of short-term versus long-term liabilities. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that profitability of the firm will change if firms alter their use of...

This paper investigates the determinants of liability maturity choice in transition markets. We formulate a model of firm value maximization that describes managers' choice of optimal debt structure. The theoretical predictions are tested using a unique panel of 4,300 Ukrainian firms during the...

This paper shows that obligations from debt hinder tacit collusion if equity owners are protected by limited liability. In contrast to its advantageous commitment value in short-run competition, leverage reduces profits from infinite interaction. Contrasting uncorrelated shocks with a cyclical...

We analyze shareholders' incentives to change the leverage of a firm that has already borrowed substantially. As a result of debt overhang, shareholders have incentives to resist reductions in leverage that make the remaining debt safer. This resistance is present even without any government...

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...

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...

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...