This paper is an empirical examination of why some industries are far more cyclical than others. Using highly disaggregate panel data, the authors examine which elements of technology and market structure appear to be most closely associated with differences in cyclicality across industries....

Revision of Working Paper 91-19

Highly variable returns, asymmetric information and a lack of collateral should cause small high-tech firms to have poor access to debt. New equity financing has several advantages over debt, but may be costly compared to internal finance. We examine an unbalanced panel of over 2,400 publicly...

Information problems and lack of collateral value should make R&D more susceptible to financing frictions than other investments, yet existing evidence on whether financing constraints limit R&D is decidedly mixed, particularly in studies of non-U.S. firms. We study a large sample of European...

We study a broad sample of firms across 32 countries and find that strong shareholder protections and better access to stock market financing lead to substantially higher long-run rates of R&D investment, particularly in small firms, but are unimportant for fixed capital investment. Credit...

This paper examines the long-standing theory that the growth of small firms is often constrained by the quantity of internal finance. Under plausible assumptions, when financing constraints are binding, an additional dollar of internal finance should generate slightly more than an additional...