We develop a framework to measure the severity of financial constraints for young firms across countries. Using ORBIS balance-sheet data for 23 economies, we show that short-term leverage rises while long-term leverage falls early in firms' life cycles, with this pattern persisting longer where...

This paper examines the incidence and determinants of credit rationing and borrower discouragement among Kenyan SMEs using firmlevel data from the 2018 World Bank Enterprise Survey. Only about onequarter of firms report no financing obstacles, while the majority face constraints of varying...

Financial literacy represents a fundamental competence in contemporary knowledge-based economies, particularly in the context of increasingly complex corporate financing instruments. Insufficient financial literacy may lead to suboptimal debt decisions, inefficient capital structures, and...

This study investigates the impacts of geopolitical risks on corporate leverage decisions of Vietnamese listed firms from 2017 to 2024. The research findings reveal a negative impact of geopolitical risks on both corporate leverage and short-term leverage. That is, Vietnamese listed firms...

This paper constructs a novel firm-level measure of geopolitical risk using textual analysis of 130,061 earnings conference call transcripts and examines its impact on firms' reliance on bank-based financing. Using a panel of 4,692 listed firms across 38 countries over 2005-2024, we find that...

We describe a novel mechanism via which multinational enterprises (MNEs) can serve to propagate productivity and credit supply shocks across borders. We augment the costly-state-verification model of Bernanke et al. [1999] with the internal capital market constraint of an MNE to analyze the...

Objective: This study investigates the impact of internationalisation on the indebtedness of construction companies in the Americas. We measured internationalisation as the share of exports in total revenues, reflecting a firm's engagement in cross-border sales. Research Design & Methods: The...

Utilising data from the selected companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and using the Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) specifically employing the Pooled Mean Group approach, this study examines the cointegrating and causal relationships among firm liquidity, performance...