 Zero-debt capital structure and the firm life cycle: empirical evidence from privately held SMEsVivien Lefebvre Venture Capital, 2021, vol. 23, issue 4, 371-387 Abstract: Recent research on firms’ capital structure highlights that up to 25% of publicly listed firms are zero-debt firms, a stylized fact that challenges financial theory. In this paper, we study privately held zero-debt small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and identify that approximately 20% of our observations correspond to zero-debt firms. This result is especially surprising in the context of a bank-oriented economy, France. We show that the likelihood of being a zero-debt firm is higher when firms are new-born, which is not surprising, but also when they grow older. In other words, we observe a U-shaped relationship between age and the likelihood of being a zero-debt firm. Our results are consistent with the idea that new-born firms cannot access debt-financing because of a lack of reputation and high informational opacity. When firms grow older, they decide to become debt-free to preserve their financial flexibility and to reduce their dependency toward banks. Overall, this paper suggests that SMEs depend less on bank financing than currently assumed. Date: 2021 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:veecee:v:23:y:2021:i:4:p:371-387 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/13691066.2021.2001700 Access Statistics for this article Venture Capital is currently edited by Colin Mason and Richard T. Harrison More articles in Venture Capital from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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