This paper investigates how product market competition affects the performance of closely held small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developing economies. In contrast to prior findings that focus on large publicly traded companies in developed economies, we find that market competition has a...

Utilizing a news-based index of geopolitical risk (GPR) and using over 62 years of data, we find that GPR has a long-lasting negative impact on leverage. This result is robust to different model specifications, different proxies for leverage, several robustness tests, and survive after...