The principal objective in this paper is to ascertain the extent to which Myers’ (1984) Pecking Order Theory (POT) of business financing appears to explain financial structure amongst a panel of 871 manufacturing SMEs legally organised as proprietary companies, taken from the Australian federal government’s Business Longitudinal Survey for three financial years from 1995-96 to 1997-98. The rese...

Interspecific brood parasites, like the shiny cowbird (Molothrus bonariensis), lay eggs in nests of other species. Shiny cowbird females peck and puncture eggs when they parasitize host nests. This behavior increases the survival of cowbird chicks when they have to compete for food with larger nestmates. However, cowbird chicks may benefit from smaller nestmates as they increase food provisioni...

In this study, using various panel models and estimators, we find empirically that the trade-off and pecking order theories are not mutually exclusive in explaining quoted Portuguese companies capital structure decisions. However, the finance behaviour of quoted Portuguese companies comes close to that forecast by the pecking order theory: (i) the magnitude of the effects of financial deficit o...

Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks’ international activities, we estimate the ordered probability of a presence abroad (extensive margin) and t...

This paper presents moments and cross-moments of utility functions and measures of utility dependence. We start with an interpretation of the nth moment of a utility function, and describe methods for its assessment in practice and consistency checks that need to be satisfied for any assessed moments. We then show how moments of a utility function (i) provide a new method to determine the param...