Market imperfections such as taxes, asymmetric information and agency problems make capital structure decisions relevant to the value of the firm. More specially, the agency theory suggests that debt financing is one of the governance mechanisms to mitigate agency costs of equity capital and...

We develop and empirically test a trade-off model for the analysis of leverage changes in mergers and acquisitions. This study extends prior findings of a post-merger increase in leverage for the acquiring firm by linking this leverage increase to merging firms that are less correlated, create...

If there is an economically important optimal capital structure, then firms that deviate too far from the optimum will face greater risk of failure or acquisition. Using data from the oil industry we find no significant evidence that capital structure policy affects acquisition or failure...

Corporate capital structure decisions are key determinants of firm performance. The agency theory suggests that debt financing is one of the mechanisms to mitigate agency problems and thus to improve firm performance. This paper provides important evidence on the performance effects of capital...

This paper uses German evidence to address two questions about corporate governance. Theeffects of ownership on corporate governance have received much recent attention, but verylittle of this has been devoted to the appropriate way to measure firm ownership. The resultsof this paper show that...

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 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....

Decisions on capital structure and leverage can significantly determine the capabilities of the company to survive, grow and develop. However, there is as yet no unified theoretical viewpoint on the capital structure that maximizes company value. The objective of this study is to investigate the...

We study whether corporate income taxation affects the long-term growth of newly incorporated companies through its effect on their choice of leverage at entry. We find that a decrease in corporate income taxation leads to a sizeable decrease in leverage at entry, and that the distribution of...