Using a longitudinal dataset comprising of detailed financial and exporting data from Belgian small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) between 1998 and 2013, this article examines the manner in which firms manage to finance their export activities and the resulting impact on corporate capital...

Purpose – This research measures information provision on the internet by private non-profit organizations (NPOs) and provides insight in underlying drivers.Design/methodology/approach – This research involves scoring websites of Belgian NPOs on the basis of their information dissemination...

In contrast to the popular assumption of independence made in the classic corporate finance literature, many companies around the world are linked through common ownership to form business groups. This paper reviews the growing literature on the consequences of business group membership. The...

Separation between operational responsibilities and those of oversight is an important point of discussion in governance. Novel to the literature, this paper not only offers direct evidence on the degree of separation, but also shows its relationship with size (ceteris paribus efficiency...

Due to low success rates, several European countries have recently reformed their U.S. Chapter 11-type bankruptcy procedures or are planning future reforms. Using unique data from a survey among judges and insolvency practitioners (receivers), we explore the ex ante expectations of the impact of...

Using a unique data set, this study explores how type of ownership (government/private) is related to processes of governance. The findings suggest that the neo-institutional perspective and the self-interest rationale of the agency perspective are helpful in explaining processes of governance...

This study examines the cash policies of business group members (i.e., affiliates). Using a panel dataset of private Belgian affiliates and comparable non-affiliated firms, the empirical results show that business group affiliates hold significantly smaller amounts of cash as compared to...

The literature on capital structure dynamics assumes that companies trade-off the advantages of a leverage adjustment and its costs. In general, private companies are assumed to face relatively large adjustment costs, and should have lower financing flexibility. However, we argue that an...

This paper explores the relationship between product market competition and firm performance under different levels of information-related capital market imperfections. We show empirically, on a sample of listed as well as unlisted firms, that for companies suffering from financing constraints,...