This paper examines the determinants of private equity activity across Europe. We analyze a total of 43 explanatory variables, categorized into six groups: Economy; Finance and capital markets; Quality of institutions; Life quality; Economic freedom and Globalization. We assess their impact on...

This article tests the hypothesis that financial supply-side shifts help to explain the low-investment climate of private firms in Germany. The core contention is that a firm's financial position contributes to its access to external finance on credit markets. Special emphasis is put on small...

We test the assumptions of trade-off theory (TOT) and pecking order theory (POT) regarding corporate leverage. The dependent variable being the debt ratio, we apply a linear model upon a balanced panel data-set of 2,370 French SMEs over the period 2002 - 2010. In accordance to TOT, trade credit...

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....