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This paper analyzes the decision of firms to sell assets to fund investments (financing asset sales). For a sample of U.S. manufacturing firms during the 1971-2010 period, we document new stylized facts about financing asset sales that cannot be explained by traditional motives for selling assets, such as financial distress or financing constraints. Using a structural model of financing, investment, and acroeconomic risk, we show that financing asset sales attenuate the debt overhang problem, because asset sale financed investments imply lower wealth transfers from equity to debt than otherwise identical but equity financed investments. This novel motive to reduce the debt overhang problem can explain how financing asset sales relate to firm characteristics and business cycles. We also confirm with simulated panels of model firms that are structurally similar to their empirical counterpart that they indeed feature the dynamic patterns of financing asset sales we observe in the data for real firms.

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly available information rather than true income, resulting in an observed income and payout process that adjust partially and over time towards a target. Insiders under-invest in production and effort so as not to unduly raise outsiders' expectations about future income, a problem that is more severe the smaller is the inside ownership and results in an "outside equity Laffer curve". A disclosure environment with adequate quality of independent auditing mitigates the problem, implying that accounting quality can enhance investments, size of public stock markets and economic growth.

This paper shows that asymmetric information about the timing of earnings can affect corporate capital structure. It sheds some new light on two following questions: why may profitable firms be interested in issuing equity, and why does debt not necessarily signal a firm quality. These issues seem to be puzzling from the classical pecking-order theory or signalling theory point of view. The paper also contributes to the analysis of the link between debt-equity choice and subsequent performance after issue (short-term versus long-term) which has been widely discussed in empirical literature but did not get enough attention in theoretical research.

This paper aims to analyze the effects of financial constraints and the financial crisis on the financing and investment policies of newly founded firms. Thereby, the analysis adds important new insights on a crucial segment of the economy. We make use of a large and comprehensive data set of French firms founded in the years 2004-2006, i.e. well before the financial crisis. Our panel data analysis shows that the global financial crisis imposed a shock (mostly demand-driven) on the financing as well as on the investments of these firms. Moreover, we find that financially constrained firms use less external debt financing and invest smaller amounts. They also rely on less trade credit. With regard to bank financing, newly founded firms which are more financially constrained accumulate less bank debt and repay initial bank debt slower than their non-financially constraint counterparts. Finally, we find that financially constrained firms are affected to a smaller degree by the financial crisis than their less financially constrained counterparts.

Using internal data of a leasing company in Germany, we examine the determinants of the probability and use of leasing by small firms. We find that small and young firms are likely to be constrained on the leasing market but use leasing to increase their debt capacity. Beyond contract- and firm-specific characteristics, demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the entrepreneur matter. Older and higher qualified entrepreneurs have easier access to leasing than those who are younger or non-educated, but the latter lease more than highly educated entrepreneurs. Female and non-married entrepreneurs of young firms use leasing to increase their debt capacity. These results are important for aging populations where the financing of entrepreneurial activities by highly qualified, older and female persons are important to sustain growth.

Although globalization can, and certainly will benefit the world, though these benefits may be overshadowed by the risks incumbent on society. The power of political authorities will become increasingly limited as actors, legitimate or illegitimate, an emerging global market. Along with these changes in society are met and a proliferation of gangs and developed unprecedented organized crime groups operating principles both national and international, using different forms of crimes.

Little evidence exists on the financing decisions of newly founded firms or on the financing dynamics of these firms over their life cycle. We aim to help filling this gap by investigating the financing dynamics of 2,456 French manufacturing firms founded between 2004 and 2006 through their legally required and reported financial statements. Because we observe significant heterogeneity in the financing decision in the firms' founding year, we focus on analyzing whether these differences widen, persist, or converge by using different convergence concepts. We identify a persistence-cum-convergence pattern. We find the existence of ß-convergence (implying that e.g. firms with lower initial levels of debt accumulate more debt over time) but not of ß-convergence (i.e. we observe an increase in the cross-sectional dispersion of the financing structure). We also show that the dynamics of financing matter for the growth path of the firms.

To understand why some firms export while others do not, it is necessary to understand major determinants which lead some firms to engage in exporting. A large base of empirical literature provides evidence that firms which trade are systematically different from those which do not trade in size, productivity, and the involvement of multinational corporations. In this paper, we introduce a financial dimension as an additional source of firm heterogeneity to understand export market participation, and examine how the impact of leverage on firms' exporting decisions varies depending on financial constraints, using a panel of 3,353 Korean manufacturing firms over the period of 1994-2011. First, we find that leverage for financially-constrained firms is negatively associated with the probability of exporting while leverage for financially-unconstrained is not. Also, we find that in the sample of financially-constrained firms, future exporters have higher leverage before they begin to export, while in the sample of financially-unconstrained firms, firms with ex-ante lower leverage self-select to export. Finally, it is found that export market participation decreases leverage for both financially-constrained and financially-unconstrained firms, but the magnitudes of decreases in leverage are larger for financially-constrained firms.

This paper broadly addresses the financing problems of the innovation process, by analysing the extent to which financial constraints hinder firms' investment in R&D and innovation, as well as investigating the role of public financial support in alleviating such constraints. In order to overcome the problems associated with measuring financial constraints, we make use of both indirect and direct measures of constraints. Our findings suggest that while financial constraints have a perverse effect upon R&D investment and innovation, there is no evidence that subsidies mitigate such constraints. Accordingly, we raise a number of questions regarding the efficiency and effectiveness of subsidies in alleviating firms' financial constraints.

This paper examines whether debt financing can undermine a supermarket firm's incentive to provide product quality. In the supermarket industry, product availability is an important measure of a retailer's quality. Using US consumer price index microdata to track inventory shortfalls, I find that taking on high financial leverage increases shortfalls. Highly leveraged firms appear to be degrading their products' quality in order to preserve current cash flow for debt service. Although reducing quality can erode both current sales and customer loyalty, firms appear to be willing to risk these outcomes in order to achieve benefits associated with debt finance. (JEL D92, G31, G32, L15, L81)

Financial constraints are a key determinant that hinders firms' ability to export. This paper analyses the nexus between these constraints and firms' engagement in international trade, as well as it explores the impact of the European monetary integration process upon firms' financial constraints. Therefore, we estimate cash to cash-flow sensitivities for different periods (1996-2000 and 2001-2004) and different groups of firms, according to their exporting and importing activity. Our results indicate that, depending on their international openness, the European monetary integration seems to have generally helped reducing the degree of financial constraints faced by Portuguese firms. Additionally, our findings suggest that rather than unconstrained firms self-selecting into exporting firms' constraints were reduced after they started exporting.

Central questions in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial finance are briefly discussed and case is made for the need for applying the behavioral finance theories and models to better understand the decision making dynamics that is involved at each stage of the entrepreneurial process. By dissecting a venture's total risk into a "Resident Risk" component and a "Behavioral Risk" component, attempt is made in this writing to introduce a preliminary risk model for evaluating key retrepreneurial decisions like the decision to launch and fund a new venture. Although the focus here is on individual decision making under highly uncertain entrepreneurial environments, but the suggested risk framework and the related discussions can be extended to decision making processes in all other uncertain environment.

Entrepreneurs bear substantial risk, but empirical evidence shows no sign of a positive premium. This paper develops a theory of endogenous entrepreneurial risk taking that explains why self-financed entrepreneurs may find it optimal to invest in risky projects offering no risk premium. Consistently with empiri cal evidence, the model predicts that poorer entrepreneurs are more likely to undertake risky projects. It also finds that incentives for risk taking are stronger when agents are impatient. (JEL G31, G32, L25, L26) Entrepreneurial activity is risky and poorly diversified. Most economic models would suggest that the high degree of entrepreneurial risk should be compensated by a significant premium in returns.1 Yet empirical evidence finds that the premium to entrepreneurial activity is surprisingly low,2 which raises the question of why people become entrepreneurs. A number of hypotheses have been offered to answer this question, mostly based on the idea that entrepreneurs have a different set of preferences or beliefs (e.g., risk tolerance or overoptimism). This paper provides an alternative theory of endogenous entrepreneurial risk taking that does not rely on individual heterogeneity of preferences or beliefs. We incorporate endogenous choice of entrepreneurial risk in a simple dynamic occupational choice model. A borrowing constrained agent chooses whether to be a worker or an entrepreneur. The occupational choice is discrete, in the sense that each activity requires full-time involvement. A worker receives fixed wage income, while an entrepreneur gets access to an entrepreneurial technology and decides how much to invest in it. Borrowing constraints induce endogenous sepa ration into different occupations: the rich, who have sufficient funds for investment, choose to be entrepreneurs, and the poor prefer to receive fixed pay by becoming workers. The indivisibility of occupational choice may create a nonconcavity in the agent's value function as a function of

Malaysia like many other Asian countries was affected by the 1997 Financial Crisis. During this Financial Crisis, many companies succumbed. Pomerleano (1998) found that leverage of the companies if unchecked can be detrimental to the health of the company. He concluded that excess leverage at the micro level and also poor profitability resulted in the 1997 East Asian crisis. The aim of this study is to analyze the survival-ability of a sample of Malaysian public listed companies (PLCs) by analyzing the impact of financing decision of the sample firms. Both financing and operating leverage, along with the performance of the companies is evaluated. This study adopts a non-parametric approach to measure the company’s survival-ability in terms of their financing decision for their production process. In order to achieve this main objective, the study attempts (i) to identify, using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), the survivors among the PLCs based on their financing decisions and (ii) to analyze the effects of leverage on the survival of the PLCs. This article contributes to current literature in two areas, namely; the evaluation of the survival-ability of the PLCs via their financing decisions. Secondly, the use of financial and operating liability leverage in evaluating survival-ability of the companies.

The development of the economic activities make almost inevitable the necessity of completing the equities with sources which represent the object of the enterprise’s leveraging. In our paper, we intend to underline the effects of a correct debt policy, concretized in an optimum capital structure, respectively in establishment of such report between the debt capital and the equities that could determine a minimum weighted average cost of capital. Reaching the objective of the optimum financial structure could be achieved most of the time, on a pragmatic way, based on the analysis of many hypothesis of leveraging, the managers taking the option towards the maximization of the firm’s value.

We examine the coexistence of banks and financial markets, studying a credit market where the qualities of investment projects are not observable and the investment decisions of entrepreneurs are not contractible. Standard banks can alleviate moral-hazard problems by securing a portion of a repayment in the case of non-investment. Financial markets operated by investment banks and rating agencies have screening know-how and can alleviate adverse-selection problems. In competition, standard banks are forced to increase repayments, since financial markets can attract the highest-quality borrowers. This, in turn, increases the share of shirkers and may make lending unprofitable for standard banks. The coexistence of financial markets and standard banks is socially inefficient. The same inefficiency can happen with the entrance of sophisticated banks, operating with a combination of rating and ongoing monitoring technologies.

Pour une entreprise, le maintien d’une croissance soutenue pendant une longue période est délicat. Il suppose, outre des conditions de marché favorables, un pilotage du rythme de développement adapté aux contraintes financières.

This paper analyzes a structural model of a levered firm that can renegotiate debt outside and in distress. The firm renegotiates outside distress to waive its financing covenant when raising investment funds and renegotiates in distress to avoid bankruptcy costs. Incorporating the ability to renegotiate both outside and in distress is crucial to explaining timing patterns of debt renegotiations. Capturing realistic incentives and timing patterns of renegotiations allows us to quantify the value of creditor governance. We explain a rich set of empirical facts in terms of influence of renegotiable debt on security values and corporate policies.

Celem artykulu jest analiza pozycji konkurencyjnej najwiekszych przedsiebiorstw branzy budowlanej z wojewodztwa podlaskiego, na tle sektora w latach 2010 – 2012. Do analizy wykorzystany zostal tzw. Radar Nagashimy, pozwalajacy okreslic w sposob syntetyczny wzgledne ksztaltowanie sie wybranego zestawu wskaznikow analizowanych podmiotow na tle konkurentow z branzy budowlanej. Z przeprowadzonej analizy konkurencyjnosci najwiekszych przedsiebiorstw branzy budowlanej z wojewodztwa podlaskiego na tle sektora wynika, iz w latach 2010 - 2012 obserwowany byl zarowno wzrost, jak i spadek wartosci wybranych wskaznikow, uzyskanych przez analizowane podmioty w obszarach: rentownosci, stabilnosci finansowej, aktywnosci kapitalowej, wzrostu i wydajnosci. W 2012 r. w porownaniu do roku poprzedniego zaobserwowano m.in. pogorszenie wartosci: niektorych wskaznikow rentownosci, wskaznikow wzrostu oraz wydajnosci pracy.

Evaluating an industrial opportunity often means to engage in financial modeling which results in estimation of a large amount of economic and accounting data, which are then gathered in an economically rational framework: the pro forma financial statements. While the standard net present value (NPV) condenses all the available pieces of information into a single metric, we make full use of the crucial information supplied in the pro forma financial statements and give a more detailed account of how economic value is created. In particular, we construct a general model, allowing for varying interest rates, which decomposes the project into investment side and financing side and quantifies the value created by either side; an equity/debt decomposition is also accomplished, which enables to appreciate the role of debt in adding or subtracting value to equityholders. Further, the major role of accounting rates of return as value drivers is highlighted, and new relative measures of worth are introduced: the project ROA and the project WACC, which aggregate information deriving from the period rates of return. To achieve these results, we make use of the Average-Internal-Rate-of-Return (AIRR) approach, recently introduced, which rests on capital-weighted arithmetic means and sets a direct relation between holding period rates and NPV.

In this paper, we explore a dynamic theory of investment and costly managerial turnover given agency conflicts between the firm manager and investors. We incorporate the possibility of the successive replacement of managers until the firm is finally liquidated, and develop a continuous-time agency model with the q-theory of investment. We derive the dynamic variations of average q, marginal q, and the optimal investment?capital ratio surrounding manager turnover. Furthermore, we also indicate that the firm’s optimal replacement/ retention decision becomes more permissive with the frequency of the replacement of managers. Our theoretical findings yield empirical implications for the joint dynamics of investment and CEO turnover policy, which are consistent with evidence provided by the existing empirical literature, and provide novel testable hypotheses.

This paper provides a theory of venture capital financing based on the complementarity between the financing and advising roles of venture capitalists. We examine the interaction between the staging of investment, that characterizes young firms with a high growth potential, and the double-sided moral hazard problem arising from the managerial contributions of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The optimal contractual arrangements have features that resemble the securities actually employed in venture capital financing. In particular, we identify an incentive-related insurance motive for making the initial financier bear the start-up's downside risk, as well as a financing motive for protecting him against dilution. This can explain the widespread use of convertible preferred stock.

The paper examines the liquidity risk of a private equity firm that decides to dispose of a large holding in its portfolio. As the sale takes time, it requires a careful balancing act of the exposure to the fluctuations in the market value of the investment against the large sale-induced price depression. A mean-standard deviation utility framework is an appealing decision tool for optimizing protracted asset dispositions. The firm maximizes the expected profit from the sale strategy net of the price concession minus a penalty function for exposure to the price risk, with the penalty weight related to a loss confidence interval.

In a sequence of fascinating papers, Leland and Leland and Toft have investigated various properties of the debt and credit of a firm which keeps a constant profile of debt and chooses its bankruptcy level endogenously, to maximise the value of the equity. One feature of these papers is that the credit spreads tend to zero as the maturity tends to zero, and this is not a feature which is observed in practice. This defect of the modelling is related to the diffusion assumptions made in the papers referred to; in this paper, we take a model for the value of the firm's assets which allows for jumps, and find that the spreads do not go to zero as maturity goes to zero. The modelling is quite delicate, but it just works; analysis takes us a long way, and for the final steps we have to resort to numerical methods.

In this paper we use balance-sheet data and information on bankruptcy to study the relationship between investment, financial constraints, and bankruptcy in a posttransition country. Our data constitute a dynamic panel and cover the period 2006–2011, which also allows us to study the impact of the 2008 crisis on Czech companies. Using investment–cash flow sensitivity to analyze financial constraints we find there is robust evidence that cash flow and the level of debt have a positive and significant impact on the investment rate. By taking a closer look at individual subsamples we reveal that the existence of financial constraints, proxied by investment–cash flow sensitivity, is evident mainly after 2008 and in small and medium-sized enterprises. At the same time, we do not uncover any evidence that firms going bankrupt during our observed period faced more severe financial constraints. Moreover, companies going bankrupt had significantly higher levels of external debt and bank loans, which indicates that they may have been, in fact, less constrained than others.

What determines firm growth over the life-cycle? Exploiting unique firm panel data on internal organization, balance sheets and innovation, representative of the entire Canadian economy, we study recent theories that examine life-cycle patterns for firm growth. These theories include organizational capital accumulation and management practices, financial frictions, learning about demand, and recent endogenous growth models with incumbent innovation. We emphasize the importance of differentiating between pure age effects of these theories and effects on size conditional on age. Our stylized facts highlight both empirical successes and shortcomings of current theory. First, models of organizational capital and innovation are broadly consistent with firm size correlations conditional on age but have difficulties matching the life-cycle dynamics of firm organization and innovation. Second, among theories we analyze, organizational capital and management practices are the most important determinants to explain intensive margin firm growth over the life-cycle. Third, although less important to explain intensive margin firm growth, financial frictions are an important determinant of firm exit, conditional on firm age.

This paper focuses on the impact of debt on the optimal policy for investment and hiring, in the light of the theory of real options. We consider a stochastic demand for the product sold by the company. We examine in particular the investment and hiring choices when, in case of enhancement levels of investment and employment, the additional cost is funded in whole or through the issuance of a new bond. We deal with this management problem in the Merton (1974)’s framework. We detail and analyze the optimal strategies. We show in particular that, in the presence of growth option, the value of the …rm is the sum of two barrier options, one of "up-and-in call" type, the other of "up-and-out call" type. The barrier corresponds to a threshold of the demand for the product sold by the …rm. The novelty of our approach is based on the combination of the optimization of the …rm management for a given production function with the valuation of its equity and debt as in Merton (1974). Recall that, in such a case, the equity value is a call option with value of the …rm as underlying asset and the amount of the debt to be repaid at maturity as the strike. Our results di¤er quite signi…cantly from those of the standard framework introduced by Tserlukevich (2008).

In this paper the corporate investment decision under financial restrictions is investigated with Belgian firm data from 1984 to 1992. An investment Euler equation is derived from a dynamic optimization model with debt ceilings and an elastic credit supply. The model is estimated by GMM for different firm groups. An important aspect is that the sample is split according to a firm's association with coordination centers. These centers have become the major external funding source of corporate investment in Belgium since 1986. The estimation results show the dependence of corporate investment on financial factors, both for non-coordination center as well as coordination center firms. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.

A sharp decline in inventory investment was an important contributor to the economic slowdown in Australia in 2008/09. I identify the extent to which this was due to a tightening in short-term credit constraints. In an experimental design setting, I identify the causal effect of short-term credit constraints on inventory investment by exploiting variation in the debt maturity structure of Australian companies just prior to the global financial crisis. I show that the companies that were forced to refinance or repay a relatively large share of debt in 2008/09 reduced inventory investment by significantly more than companies that were due to refinance or repay their debt at some other time. A case study on the Australian motor vehicle industry supports the hypothesis that a decline in the availability of short-term credit significantly hampered corporate investment in inventories in 2008/09.

This paper investigates if firms’ size and age, and dividend payment can work as good proxies of financial constraints faced by firms. The motivation is that, these proxies have been used by several authors to sort and distinguish firms according to a level of financial distress. To conduct our empirical tests, we make use of two different approaches in order to obtain robust results—first, we estimate the sensitivity of investment to cash-flow, then we employ the sensitivity of cash stocks to cash-flow. Our results, while supporting previous literature on the inverse relationship between size, dividend policy and financial constraints, they cast some doubts on previously devised relationships between age and the level of constraints. Additionally, our results suggest that, contrary to what is commonly accepted, the relationship between size and financial constraints seems to be in general U-shaped.

Firm’s strategic orientation involves synchronizing environmental dynamics, corporate strategy and capital structure in order to achieve firm performance targets. The co-alignment model used successfully in the hospitality industry might be used in a wider context as a framework in explaining these relationships simultaneously. Using the data of public firms in Indonesia during the period of 1996-2010, we found that co-alignment model can be implemented in property and real estate industry as well as in hospitality industry.

Based on a continuous-time model of quasi-hyperbolic discounting, this paper provides an analytically tractable framework of entrepreneurial firms’ investment and capital structure decisions with time-inconsistent preferences. We show that the impact of time-inconsistent preferences depends not only on the financing structures (all-equity financing or debt-equity financing), but also on the entrepreneurs’ belief regarding their future timeinconsistent behavior (sophisticated or naive). Time-inconsistent preferences delay investment under both all-equity financing and debt-equity financing. However, the impact is weakened under debt-equity financing, because debt financing increases the payoff value upon investment and accelerates investment. Naive entrepreneurs invest later and default earlier than sophisticated entrepreneurs, leading to a shorter operating period. Moreover, we find that naive entrepreneurs may choose higher leverage, while sophisticated entrepreneurs always choose lower leverage, compared to the time-consistent benchmark. These results support the empirical findings in entrepreneurial finance.

The recent years have been prolific in terms of development of new measures of firms’ financial constraints. This paper surveys the main strategies proposed. Additionally, we discuss the key advantages and disadvantages of each measure as well as the data requirements for implementation. Finally, it provides a useful tool for researchers that intend to analyse the impact of constraints on firm behaviour.

Many recent studies have pointed out that firms with cash stocks or strong cash flow are financially resilient, enabling them to continue to invest and grow even when they experience economic shocks. In this paper we ask whether Asian firms were resilient to the recent financial crisis. Using firm level data for eight Asian countries from 2001-2009, we explore the relationship between asset growth, investment, and cash flow and find that firms use all available internal funds to channel towards asset growth even during the financial crisis. We conclude that firms in Asia were resilient to the financial crisis because they continued to use internal funds to invest and grow as they had done prior to the crisis.

Even though innovation subsidies and financial constraints are two closely related lines of research, the link between them is rather unexplored. This paper is, to our knowledge, the first to explicitly analyse both the allocation of innovation subsidies and their role in alleviating firms’ financial constraints. It is not the purpose of the paper to question whether subsidies foster innovation, but rather if: a) subsidies are being correctly allocated to financially constrained firms; b) they effectively reduce financial constraints. We argue that, in addition to the usual “public good” arguments behind the allocation of innovation subsidies, the extent to which firms are able to obtain external funding should not be overlooked. Overall, our results question the allocation and effectiveness of subsidies in alleviating financial constraints of firms willing to innovate. Accordingly, these findings have serious implications on the design of future innovation policy actions.

Recessions and financial crisis increase financial constraints and disproportionally affect constrained firms. This paper investigates the differences in firms’ financial constraints between sectors using a cash to cash-flow rationale (Almeida et al., 2004) and a firm specific index of constraints (Hovakimien and Hovakimien, 2009). Interpreting higher sensitivities of cash to cash flow as evidence of higher constraints, we find that the relationships between firm size, firm age and constraints are, in general, non-monotonic and not robust to economic sector disaggregation, which contrasts with previous findings.

Status concerns can drive risk-taking behavior by affecting the payoff to a marginal dollar of wealth. If status concerns arise endogenously due to competition in the marriage market, then unmarried individuals should take greater risks. We test this hypothesis by studying corporate CEOs. We find that single CEOs are associated with firms exhibiting higher stock return volatility, pursue more aggressive investment policies, and are not affected by increases in idiosyncratic risk. These effects are weaker for older CEOs. Our results also hold when we use variation in divorce laws across states to instrument for CEO marital status.

We study the investment timing problem where two firms that compete for investment preemption know in advance the time at which the economic condition changes. We show that the so-called Bad News Principle applies to the leader firm’s investment decision near maturity in many cases. This result indicates that the option value to wait does have an impact even in a competitive situation, which is in contrast to the previous literature.

We evaluate differences in investment behavior between stock market listed and privately held firms in the U.S. using a rich new data source on private firms. Listed firms invest less and are less responsive to changes in investment opportunities compared to observably similar, matched private firms, especially in industries in which stock prices are particularly sensitive to current earnings. These differences do not appear to be due to unobserved differences between public and private firms, how we measure investment opportunities, lifecycle differences, or our matching criteria. We suggest that the patterns we document are most consistent with theoretical models emphasizing the role of managerial myopia.

Financial constraints are a key determinant that hinders firms' ability to export. This paper analyses the nexus between these constraints and firms' engagement in international trade, as well as it explores the impact of the European monetary integration process upon firms' financial constraints. Therefore, we estimate cash to cash-flow sensitivities for different periods (1996-2000 and 2001-2004) and different groups of firms, according to their exporting and importing activity. Our results indicate that, depending on their international openness, the European monetary integration seems to have generally helped reducing the degree of financial constraints faced by Portuguese firms. Additionally, our findings suggest that, rather than unconstrained firms self-selecting into exporting, firms' constraints were reduced after they started exporting.

We document a new business cycle fact: the cross-sectional standard deviation of firm-level investment (investment dispersion) is robustly and significantly procyclical. This makes investment dispersion different from the dispersion of productivity and output growth, which is countercyclical. Investment dispersion is more procyclical in the goods-producing sectors, for smaller firms and for structures. We show that a heterogeneous-firm real business cycle model with countercyclical idiosyncratic firm risk and non-convex adjustment costs calibrated to match moments of the long-run investment rate distribution, produces a time series correlation coefficient between investment dispersion and aggregate output of 0.58, close to the 0.45 in the data. We argue, more generally, that cross-sectional business cycle dynamics impose tight empirical restrictions on the physical environments and the structural parameters of heterogeneous-firm models.

This paper studies how cross-border venture capital investors as opposed to domestic venture capital investors influence the development of their portfolio companies. For this purpose, we use a longitudinal research design and track sales from the year of initial venture capital investment up to seven years after this investment in 692 European technology-based companies. Findings demonstrate how companies backed by cross-border venture capital investors initially exhibit lower sales growth compared to companies backed by domestic investors. After a couple of years, however, companies backed by cross-border investors exhibit higher sales growth compared to companies backed by domestic investors. Finally, companies that raise finance from a syndicate comprising both domestic and cross-border investors develop into the biggest sales generators. Overall, this study provides a more textured understanding of the role played by venture capital investors as their portfolio companies develop and thereby require different resources or capabilities over time.

Today's shortage of financial resources calls for the attention of researchers to the problem of financial constraints faced by firms. In this paper we analyse firms' financial constraints by estimating both investment-cash flow sensitivities and cash-cash flow sensitivities upon a large unbalanced panel of Portuguese firms in order to obtain robust findings. Additionally, we classify firms according to characteristics that are generally believed to indicate the presence of constraints (size, age and dividend payment). Our results clearly show that Portuguese firms are, in general, financially constrained. Furthermore, we verify that such constraints are more severe for certain groups of firms, in particular those firms that are smaller and do not pay dividends. However, we do not find evidence that age as a good proxy for financial constraints. Finally, we cast some doubts on the direct implementation of the SA index as a measure of financial constraints.

This paper is the first to explicitly explore the differences in firms' financial constraints between and within sectors of economic activity, by estimating the sensitivities of cash holdings to cash-flow upon an unique dataset of Portuguese firms. It shows that, not only there are remarkable differences between sectors and, especially, industries, but most importantly, that the commonly accepted inverse relationships between financial constraints and size and age are not robust to sectorial disaggregation.

We consider whether there is statistical evidence for a causal relationship between government expenditures and real GDP growth in postwar Japan. After studying the time-series properties of these variables, we find that government consumption and government investment both have a positive and causal effect on growth. This suggests that fiscal policy may not have been as ineffective during the last two decades of Japan’s stagnant growth as some have suggested, but may have helped to prevent an even more severe balance-sheet recession after the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy.

Empirical studies have found that a low interest rate environment accelerates firms f investment and debt financing, leading to subsequent balance-sheet problems in many countries in recent years. We examine the mechanism whereby firms f debt financing and investment become more accelerated and the credit risk rises under a low interest rate environment from the perspective of a real options model. We find that firms tend to increase debt financing and investment not only under strong expectations of continued low interest rates but also when there are expectations of future interest rate increases, and such behavior causes higher credit risk. We also find that when future interest rate rises are expected, the investment decisions vary depending on how firms incorporate the possibility of future interest rises. Specifically, myopic firms make glast-minute investments h based on concerns over future interest rate hikes, and this behavior increases their credit risk. In contrast, economically rational firms choose to decrease their investments, carefully considering the likelihood of future interest rate hikes.

We analyze the link between firms’ access to finance and their decisions to enter and exit the export market. We employ the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) conducted in 2005 and 2008-2009 to 28 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We find that more productive, foreign owned and older firms are more likely to start exporting, while larger and more productive firms are less likely to exit the export market. With respect to ex-ante firm characteristics, our results confirm that larger and more productive, as well as foreign-owned, firms self-select into exporting. By contrast, there is no relationship between the decision of firms to enter or exit export markets and their access to finance. This may suggest that internal finance plays a greater role in Eastern European and CIS countries than in developed countries

The paper addresses the question whether the preferential treatment of retained earnings according to section 34a EStG is suitable to achieve a comparable tax burden of partnerships and corporations. It can be shown that it is impossible to determine a reference value for all domestic companies. By introducing a “virtual principle of separation” (virtuelles Trennungsprinzip) we allow entrepreneurs to separate between the level of the firm and the owner of the firm, when retained earnings are to be taxed.

The paper analyzes the link between financial constraints and firm export behavior. Our main finding is that firms enjoying better financial health are more likely to become exporters. The result contrasts with the previous empirical literature which found evidence that export participation improves firm financial health, but not that export starters display any ex-ante financial advantage. On the contrary, we find that financial constraints act as a barrier to export participation. Better access to external financial resources increases the probability to start exporting and also shortens the time before firms decide to serve foreign customers. This finding has important policy implications as it suggests that, in presence of financial markets imperfections, public intervention can be called for to help efficient but financially constrained firms to overcome the sunk entry costs into export markets and expand their activities abroad.

International audience; This paper studies how the assignment of patents as collateral determines the savings of firms and magnifies the effect of innovative rents on investment in research and development (R&D). We analyse the behaviour of innovative firms that face random and lumpy investment opportunities in R&D. High growth rates of innovations, possibly higher than the real rate of interest, may be achieved despite financial constraints. There is an optimal level of publicly funded policy by the patent and trademark office that minimizes the legal uncertainty surrounding patents as collateral and maximizes the growth rate of innovations.