We find that firms behave consistently with how their CEOs behave personally in the context of leverage choices. Analyzing data on CEOs' leverage in their most recent primary home purchases, we find a positive, economically relevant, robust relation between corporate and personal leverage in the...

Recent studies have debated the impact of investor protection law on corporate behavior and value. I exploit the staggered passage of state securities fraud statutes (“blue sky laws”) in the United States to estimate the causal effects of investor protection law on firm financing decisions...

In this paper we present a real-life application of a fuzzy expert system aimed at rating and ranking firms. Unlike standard DCF models, it integrates financial, strategic and business determinants and processes both quantitative and qualitative variables. Twenty-one value drivers are defined,...

We compare how bond market access affects firms' investment decisions in the United States and the euro area. Having a bond rating enables US corporations to invest more and undertake more acquisitions. In contrast, in the euro area, bond ratings have no effect on investment decisions....

This article provides a comprehensive assessment of private firms' financing sources and their relation with financial reporting practices. We consider debt financing (bank financing, leasing, and government guarantees), equity financing (family ownership, government ownership, employee...

This article provides a comprehensive assessment of private firms' financing sources and their relation with financial reporting practices. We consider debt financing (bank financing, leasing, and government guarantees), equity financing (family ownership, government ownership, employee...

Why don't non-financial companies in Europe issue more equity? Using experimental data on firms from Europe, this paper analyses how firms trade-off between debt and external equity financing. It finds that firms are willing to pay a substantial premium on debt when presented with an equity...

We argue that the recent corporate governance reform in the Netherlands provides a natural experiment to explore the impact of changes in corporate governance on financing policy. We find that, relative to a control sample of comparable firms outside the Netherlands, Dutch firms significantly...

We develop and test a nested logit model to examine how firms choose between a rights offering and a private equity placement. We find that family-controlled firms avoid issue methods that dilute control benefits or subject them to more monitoring, in particular when the family's control margin...

We apply control rights theory to explain the structure and determinants of financial covenants in private equity backed leveraged buyouts. We analyze 130 German transactions from 2000 to 2008, covering about 40 percent of the LBO market during this period. We consider Germany to be a superior...