0000000000347417
AUTHOR
Alejandro Casino-martínez
An agency approach to debt maturity of unlisted and listed firms in the European setting
Abstract This study analyses the debt maturity of two groups of companies – unlisted and listed – throughout the period 2005–2013. The research takes an agency costs approach to explore the determinants of firms' debt maturity structure for a set of five countries, chosen for being representative of the European Union (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom). Agency costs, as well as institutional and macroeconomic factors, turn out to be decisive in explaining firms’ financial policies regarding debt maturity, during the economic crisis that started in 2007–2008. Our findings indicate that contracting costs had a greater impact on unlisted firms during the post-crisis subperi…
The regulatory environment and financial constraints of private firms in the European Union
This study analyzes the influence of the institutional environment on firms' capital structure in the European Union (EU). Unlike other research, we focus on private firms and include data from all EU countries from 2010 to 2018. We split the sample into groups of small and large firms, which we consider financially constrained and unconstrained, respectively. Throughout the study, we posit that institutional effects on financing policies vary with size, with the effects being greater for constrained firms as they face more financing frictions. We also run regression models controlling for firm-level characteristics and relevant macroeconomic factors. Our findings reveal that a high-quality…
Capital Structure and Sensitivity in SME Definition: A Panel Data Investigation
We provide an empirical examination of the pecking order theory on capital structure in the field of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). We mainly investigate if the results are sensitive to different definitions commonly used for these types of companies. Our evidence offers strong support for the growth opportunities and cash flow hypotheses. Firms that have many growth opportunities and small cash flows clearly show more debt in their capital structure. Moreover, results do not change when different SME definitions or sample sizes are used.