Essays in Corporate Finance

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays about firm financing. The first essay detects the bank-firm relationship in a transition country while the second and third essays address the importance of country factors in a company's capital structure decisions. The question of the extent in which the financial sector problems "spill over" to firms is an important issue to study and it is particularly under-explored in the context of transition economies, where the financial systems are fragile. In my first essay I study the effect of an Estonian bank's failure in 1998 on its corporate loan clients by comparing the performance of clients to that of a random sample of other firms. First, I analyze whether bank bankruptcy causes the bankruptcy of client firms. I find that client firms are less likely to survive until 2000 even after controlling for their pre- bank bankruptcy performance. Second, I analyze the behavior of firms' profitability, liquidity, and growth of fixed assets. I find liquidity to be the only variable that decreases for the client firms compared to the control firms after the bank bankruptcy. In my second essay I evaluate the importance of firm-specific, country- institutional and macroeconomic factors in explaining the firm leverage variation simultaneously. I use a large European...