We exploit the natural institutional variation in Western Europe to examine leverage (and debt maturity) for listed and non-listed companies (NLCs). We find that the legal efficiency measure (Djankov, et al, 2008) is more closely related to the amount of leverage and debt maturity than is the...

Abstract: We examine how asset structure is related to leverage in different institutional environments, using tens of thousands of firm-level observations from small, privately held, emerging market firms that are likely to face financing constraints. Our empirical analysis indicates that the...

We exploit the natural institutional variation in Western Europe to examine leverage (and debt maturity) for listed and non-listed companies (NLCs). We find that the legal efficiency measure (Djankov, et al, 2008) is more closely related to the amount of leverage and debt maturity than is the...