Early Modern Dutch corporate finance had two notable features, a remarkable ease of raising large amounts of capital and a flexible legal framework. Having pioneered new corporate forms with two intercontinental trading companies, Dutch business adopted such forms on a wider scale only during...

This paper tests the static tradeoff theory against the pecking order theory. We focus on an important difference in prediction: the static tradeoff theory argues that a firm increases leverage until it reaches its target debt ratio, while the pecking order yields debt issuance until the debt...