We examine the differential effects of financial status and exporting activity on the likelihood of survival for firms in the UK and France - two countries with different financial systems. We aim to answer two main questions: What is the direct impact of financial characteristics and different...

Around the world (with the U.S. and U.K. as exceptions) concentrated ownership structures and controlling shareholders are predominant even among listed firms. We provide novel empirical evidence how such controlling shareholders, in particular founding families, affect payout policy decisions....

In this paper, we analyse whether bank owners or bank managers were the driving force behind the risks incurred in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008. We show that owner controlled banks had higher profits in the years before the crisis, and incurred larger losses and were more likely...

This article provides a theoretical framework to analyze the impact of banking regulation on the risk-taking behavior of banks by incorporatig the incentives of three risk-neutral agents - the welfaristic regulator, the shareholder and the manager. While shareholders are assumed to maximize the...

This paper provides a quantitative review of the empirical evidence on the impact of taxation on corporate debt finance. On the basis of 626 primary estimates taken from 23 studies, we find that the median tax-rate elasticity of debt ratios is around 0.44. The median tax-rate elasticity of...

This paper studies how credit constraints develop over bank relationships. I analyze a unique dataset of matched loan application and loan contract information and measure credit constraints as the ratio of requested to granted loan amounts. I find that the most important determinants of...

Motivated by current concerns over foreign currency exposures in emerging economies, we examine the currency denomination of business loans made in Bulgaria prior to the current crisis. We analyze information on the requested and granted currency for more than hundred thousand loans granted by...

This paper derives the optimal financial contract when a borrowing entrepreneur can evade taxes in a model of costly state verification. In contrast to previous literature on costly state verification and financial contracting, we find that standard debt contracts are not optimal when tax...