Start-up entrepreneurs are often commercially inexperienced. In giving managerial advice, venture capitalists can importantly enhance the success of innovative but highly risky ventures. The supply of experienced venture capitalists is not eas-ily increased, however, when the rate of business...

It has been observed, in a number of european countries like France, that the increase in real long term interest rates seemd to imply a decrease in the corporate debt ratios (the debt to equity ratio or the debt to value added ratio) and also a decrease in th share of wages in value-added. We...

We focus on an exogenous event that changes the cost of capital of a company – the addition of its stock to the S&P 500 index – and investigate how companies react to it by modifying their corporate financial and investment policies. This allows us to test capital structure theories in an...

It is typically less profitable for an opportunistic borrower to divert inputs than to divert cash. Suppliers, therefore, may lend more liberally than banks. This simple argument is at the core of our contract theoretic model of trade credit in competitive markets. The model implies that trade...

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional...

This paper uses a unique micro-level data-set on Chinese firms to test for the existence of a 'political-pecking order' in the allocation of credit. Our findings are threefold. Firstly, private Chinese firms are credit constrained while State-owned firms and foreign-owned firms in China are not;...

Non-US firms frequently pay a substantial premium to have a US bank lead their initial public offering of equity, even when the issuing firm is not seeking a listing on a US exchange. We provide evidence that this decision reflects an expectation that US banks deliver a higher quality bundle of...

In a recent paper, Fernandez (2004a) argues that the present value effect of the tax saving on debt cannot be calculated as simply the present value of the tax shields associated with interest. This contradicts standard results in the literature. It implies that, even though the capital market...

The average firm going public or issuing new equity underperforms the market in the long run. A potential explanation of this long-run underperformance has to do with the endogeneity of the number of new issues. That is, due to the clustering of events after periods of high abnormal returns in...

In this Paper we analyse the impact of product market competition and ownership structure on corporate performance. We focus on the firms listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, which are either privatised or newly created firms. First, we study the separate effects of competition and ownership...