This paper reviews the impact of institutional variables on the capital structure of firms throughout the recent financial crises (dot.com bubble, subprime crisis, and European sovereign debt crisis). For the first time, the sovereign general gross debt and current account balance have entered...

This paper examines the effect of earnings management on financial leverage and how this relation is influenced by institutional environments by employing a large panel of 25,798 firms across 37 countries spanning the years 1989 to 2009. We find that firms with high earnings management...

In this paper, we examine the differences in information asymmetry and financing patterns and a generalized version of the trade-off theory across countries with different institutional environments. We find that firms in Civil law countries have higher information asymmetry, rely more on...

The paper presents results of an ongoing research project on corporate financing patterns in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since 1999. It addresses three broad issues. Which are the specifics of corporate financing in CEE compared to countries in Western Europe? Which country institutional...