The key contribution of this paper is an empirical examination of the financial growth life cycle model by combining a number of statistical tests. This approach is significantly different to that traditionally adopted in empirical investigations of SME financing, which is to examine the...

Employing firm-level observations from 13 countries over a seven year period, and controlling for an extensive set of firm-level characteristics, industry effects and country-level institutional variables, we provide a conceptual framework and empirical analysis of how culture influences capital...

This paper presents an empirical examination of firm characteristic determinants of the capital structure of a sample of 299 Irish small and medium sized firms (SMEs hereafter). Hypotheses are formulated from pecking order and agency theories incorporating a financial growth life cycle approach,...

This paper examines the financing of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs hereafter) through a financial growth life cycle paradigm. Reporting the financing patterns of 299 Irish SMEs across six age categories, the relative importance of sources of debt and equity finance for each age...

This paper presents an empirical description of the capital structures of a sample of 299 Irish small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs hereafter). The sources of finance used by respondents are delineated by internal and external sources and viewed through a life cycle model. Recognising the...

The ability of investors to implement seasonal strategies implied by academic papers has been widely criticized, most recently by Hudson et al. (Applied Financial Economics, 12, 681-86, 2002). This paper addresses these concerns, and provides an example of a strategy derived from academic papers...

In this article we investigate the distribution of futures market returns and volumes. A variety of contracts are selected from agriculture, foreign exchange, industrial, equity and interest rate market sectors. Tests of normality indicate that all daily returns and daily volumes are not...

We investigate the information shares of the two main centers of gold trading, over a 25 year period, using non overlapping 4 month windows. We find that neither London nor New York are dominant in terms of price information share, that the dominant market switches from time to time and that...

We examine by means of a survey and subsequent statistical analysis the extent of financial risk tolerance in Irish adults. We administer the (J. Grable & Lytton, 1999) 13 item risk tolerance instrument, and find confirmed a number of stylized facts found elsewhere on age, gender and education...