Small and medium-sized enterprises are a centrepiece of Europe?s economy. Due to their limited size and their generally lower creditworthiness, their access to financial market instruments is more limited than for large enterprises, which benefit from more elaborate Treasury operations,...

Recent research shows that firms with more debt invest less. Yet, the underlying reasons remain unclear. In this paper, we exploit some of the specific characteristics of unlisted enterprises to investigate the non-linear and multi-period aspects of theoretical asymmetric information and agency...

Titman (1984) is the first to argue that non-financial stakeholders (customers, suppliers and employees) pass on their expected liquidation costs to the firm. In his framework, firms can influence the probability of liquidation by choosing an appropriate capital structure. Other studies have...

In this paper, we empirically examine how leverage affects firm performance when information asymmetries are large. We argue that entrepreneurs are strongly incentivized to maximize earnings when leverage is high in order to reduce the likelihood of adverse credit decisions and firm liquidation....