We estimate firms' cash flow sensitivity of cash to empirically test how the financial system's structure and activity level influence their financial constraints. For this purpose we merge Almeida, Campello and Weisbach (2004), a pathbreaking new design for evaluating a firm's financial...

This article investigates how “systematic” adjustment costs proxied by market imperfections, and macroeconomic conditions affect capital structure dynamics in a cross-country setting. We document substantial variations in firms' capital structure adjustments across countries and,...

Does state ownership hinder or help firms access credit? We use data on almost 4 million firms in 89 countries to study the relationship between state ownership and corporate leverage. Controlling for country-sector-year fixed effects and conventional firm-level determinants of leverage, we show...

Does state ownership hinder or help firms access credit? We use data on almost 4 million firms in 89 countries to study the relationship between state ownership and corporate leverage. Controlling for country-sector-year fixed effects and conventional firm-level determinants of leverage, we show...

In this paper we explore empirically a long-standing question in the literature on finance for growth, namely whether the financial structure -in terms of the size of the banking system relative to the capital market- matters for economic growth. We build upon the existing literature by...

We propose a regulatory approach for restricting debt financing as an amplification mechanism across the financial system. A small stylised model illustrates the trade-off between static and time varying limits on leverage in dampening the financial cycle. The policy section proposes its...