For private firms, public disclosure of financial information is often at management's discretion. We argue that differences in incentives to publicly disclose result in differences in data availability for private firms, which in turn can affect the conclusions of studies that rely on private...

We examine whether the public availability of product market incumbents' financial disclosures leads to greater capital structure mimicking of incumbents by entrants. Exploiting a change in disclosure enforcement for German private firms in the mid-2000s, we find entrant-incumbent mimicking...

The paper analyses a strategy for avoiding the disclosure of the financial statements of a limited partnership with a limited liability company as general partner (GmbH & Co. KG) according to German Commercial Code (HGB). It describes the formal process of the joining of a natural person as an...