This paper examines the relationship between firms' innovation activities and the hierarchy of financing behaviours. We analyse the role of innovation inputs (R&D), intermediate outputs (patents) and outcomes (product and process innovations) as sources of information asymmetry in financing...

The paper focuses on the capital structure of firms in their early years of operation. Through the lens of Pecking Order Theory, we study how the pursuit of innovation influences the reliance of firms on different types of internal and external finance. Panel analyses of data on 7,394 German...

This paper analyses the role that institutional factors play in explaining differences in the capital structure of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across regions belonging to a single country. Specifically, it studies the effect of the development of the financial sector and of the...

We propose a theory of optimal firm financing given nested information problems of adverse selection and agency cost. We prove that there exists a unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium with novel features: First, three types of optimal contracts arise endogenously, i.e., equity, transparent debt...

A theory of capital structure in which costs associated with asymmetric information are the sole friction is used to present a new perspective on the standard pecking order theory. In the model, both the amount of debt and the restrictiveness of the associated debt covenants are considered to be...

The objective of this paper was to explore whether and how the main capital structure determinants of SMEs affected capital structure determination in different ways during the years of economic crisis. We used panel data of 8,052 SMEs operating in Greece during 2009-2012. We found that the...

The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of corporate financial structure on a firm's export propensity, especially that of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The paper contributes to the literature concerned with the relationship between exports and financial constraints from the...

There is tremendous interest, in the economic literature, for the determinants of firms’ capital structure decisions. A rich body of empirical works now exists that purports to identify firm- and country-level factors affecting firms’ financing patterns. In addition, more recently, a new...