This paper examines the relation between a borrowing firm's ownership structure and its choice of debt source using a novel, hand-collected data set on corporate ownership, control and debt structures for 9,831 firms in 20 countries from 2001 to 2010. We find that the divergence between control...

The corporate governance literature has shown that self-interested controlling owners tend to divert corporate resources for private benefits at the expense of other shareholders. Such behavior leads the controlling owners to prefer long maturity debt to short maturity debt, to avoid frequent...

A dual-class ownership structure, accompanied by disproportional control rights, is traditionally considered to be an inferior form of governance. We examine how the capital structure choices made by dual-class firms (i.e., by their controlling shareholders or insiders), as well as the...

The study seeks to examine how the severity of corruption in a country influences corporate governance and financing decisions of firms. We analyse 15-years (1996-2010) data pertaining to 556 non-financial firms drawn from 10 African countries using models that link firm financing, ownership...