We estimate firms’ cash flow sensitivity of cash to empirically test how the financial system’s structure and activity level influence their financial constraints. For this purpose we merge Almeida et al. (2004), a path-breaking design for evaluating a firm’s financial constraints, with Levine (2002), who paved the way for comparative analysis of financial systems around the world. We conjectur...

We studied the effect of family control on the characteristics of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises located in the Northern Italian province of Bergamo. The analysis included aspects such as demographic characteristics, cost and productivity of labour, financial ratios, and the performance of 745 SMEs. Family‐ controlled firms emerged as a predominant organiza...

The financial sector is unique in being largely self-governed: the majority of financial firms’ shares are held by other financial institutions. This raises the possibility that monitoring of financial firms is especially undermined by conflicts of interest due to personal and professional links between these firms and their shareholders. To investigate this possibility, we scrutinize the aspec...

Recent years have been characterized by massive layoffs of IT workers – primarily triggered by declining corporate profitability and increased off-shoring of IT work. However, it is unclear whether IT worker downsizing has generated any economic returns or business performance improvements for IT firms. In this study, our primary objective is to investigate the financial performance impacts of ...

In today’s competitive environment evaluating firms’ performance properly, is an important issue not only for investors and creditors but also for the firms that are in the same sector. Determining the competitiveness of the firms and evaluating the financial performance of them is also crucial for the sector’s development. The aim of this study is developing a fuzzy model to evaluate the perfo...

We examine the relation between firms’ financial structures and their risky investment strategies in Taiwan’s banking industry. Regressions cover two subperiods: before the first financial reform (1996– 2000) and after the first financial reform (2001–2006), to address the impacts of the first financial reform on banking firms’ financial structures. Our first result demonstrates that the restri...

Recent literature on multinational firms has stressed the importance of low productivity as a barrier to the cross-border expansion of firms. However, firms typically also need external finance to finance the costs of market entry. In addition to productivity-related real barriers, financial constraints may thus restrict market entry. Building on a model of multinational firms facing real and f...