Does bank instability push borrowers to use crowdfunding as a source of external finance? We identify stressed banks and link them to a unique, manually constructed sample of 157 new ventures seeking equity crowdfunding. The sample comprises projects from all German equity crowdfunding platforms...

The current literature on firm ownership around the world shows that concentrated ownership with only one or a few controlling owners is common, especially in many European and Asian countries. The dispersed ownership has proven to be uncommon and even countries with supposed dispersed ownership...

This paper investigates the impact of legal tradition and firm size on investment performance for firms in 16 European countries. Europe as a region is of special interest in this sense since the legal systems differs widely within a concentrated geographical area. Anglo Saxon, German, French as...

This paper investigates how family ownership, control and management affect firm investment performance. We use the identity of the CEO and the COB to establish under what management the firm is: founder, descendent or external management. The analysis shows that founder management has no effect...

In 1997, France Telecom, the state-owned French telephone company, went through a partial privatization. We adapt a standard neoclassical model to predict how employees might respond to the firm's offer to sell them various classes of shares. Using a database that tracks over 200,000 eligible...

This paper investigates the impact of the financial crisis on investment decisions in innovative versus non-innovative firms. Firms are defined as being innovative if they have introduced a new product to the market. The empirical test is based on data for the years before and after the recent...

German savers are renowned for preferring safe, long-term investments, thus providing patient capital, with bank deposits playing an important role. Using a unique data set provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank for German banks, we examine whether German depositors are really that patient,...

We show that exported products exit the US market sooner if they violate the Heckscher-Ohlin notion of comparative advantage. Crucially, this pattern is stronger when exporting country has a well-developed banking system, measured by a high ratio of bank credit over the GDP. Banks thus push...

We test one of the main predictions of the financial flexibility paradigm that expectations about future firm-specific shocks affect the firm's leverage. We extract the expectations of small and large future shocks from the market prices of equity options. We find that expectations for future...

This paper evaluates the importance of building a composite metric of financial soundness for the private corporate sector in Colombia. Instead of relying on the individual and sometimes restrictive financial ratio analysis approach, the purpose of this document is to provide a single metric...