The capital-structure decision is one of the most fundamental issues in corporate finance. Numerous studies have been conducted to test the two major competing theories of capital structure (Trade-Off Theory and Pecking-Order Theory), yet none of these studies has analyzed the capital-structure...

This study examines executive compensation using data from two nationally representative samples of privately held U.S. corporations conducted ten years apart—in 1993 and 2003—and uses these data to test a number of hypotheses. We find that: (i) the level of executive pay at privately held...

In this study, we analyze the firm’s choice of legal form of organization (“LFO”). We find that only about one in three firms begins operations as a proprietorship, while almost as many begin as limited-liability companies and as corporations. Moreover, this distribution is remarkably...

In this study, we use data from the SSBFs to provide new information about the use of credit by small businesses in the U.S. More specifically, we first analyze firms that do and do not use credit; and then analyze why some firms use trade credit while others use bank credit. We find that one in...