Some of the most widely expressed myths about the German financial system are concerned with the close ties and intensive interaction between banks and firms, often described as Hausbank relationships. Links between banks and firms include direct shareholdings, board representation, and proxy...

This paper examines the dynamics trade-off financial structure in presence of ownership dispersion of newly created firms. Our objective is to test empirically the relevance of trade-off theory regards the debt funding behavior of business start-up. We use a sample of 200 business start-ups and...