On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

In this paper, we explore two of the most relevant theories that explain financial policy in small and medium enterprises (SMEs): pecking order theory and trade-off theory. Panel data methodology is used to test the empirical hypotheses over a sample of 6482 Spanish SMEs during the five-year...

The objective of this work is to analyse the factors motivating firms to follow a conservative (or low-leverage) financial policy over several years. We carry out a study on a sample of 1,396 Spanish firms in the period 1993-2001. Using logit regression and various difference of means analyses,...

The principal aim of this paper is to test how firm characteristics affect Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) capital structure. We carry out an empirical analysis over a panel data of 6482 non?financial Spanish SMEs along the five-year period 1994?1998, modelling the leverage ratio as a function...

Small and medium-sized enterprises are a centrepiece of Europes economy. Due to their limited size and their generally lower creditworthiness, their access to financial market instruments is more limited than for large enterprises, which benefit from more elaborate Treasury operations, economies...

This paper studies the determinants of the capital structure of small and medium sized companies. In a second step, this analysis is extended to large companies. The research is based on two financial theories (i) pecking order theory (TPO) and (ii) management strategy theory (TEP), with...

This paper proposes a historically-grounded mechanism-design model of corporate finance, with two-side risk aversion under limited contract enforceability, where (inside) equity held by entrepreneurs, debt and (outside) equity coexist. This capital structure shares optimally the...

This paper critically surveys the key literature on corporate financing policy, capital structure and firm ownership in order to identify the leading theoretical and empirical issues in this area. The theoretical component of the survey attempts to reconcile competing theories of capital...

Small and medium-sized enterprises are a centrepiece of Europe's economy. Due to their limited size and their generally lower creditworthiness, their access to financial market instruments is more limited than for large enterprises, which benefit from more elaborate Treasury operations,...