State Ownership and Corporate Leverage Around the World

Ralph De Haas, Sergei Guriev and Alexander Stepanov

No 17300, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Does state ownership hinder or help firms access credit? We use data on almost 4 million firms in 89 countries to study the relationship between state ownership and corporate leverage. Controlling for country-sector-year fixed effects and conventional firm-level determinants of leverage, we show that state ownership is robustly and negatively related to corporate leverage. This relationship holds across most of the firm-size distribution - with the important exception of the largest companies - and is stronger in countries with weak political and legal institutions. A panel data analysis of privatized firms and a comparison of privatized with matched control firms yield similar qualitative and quantitative effects of state ownership on leverage.

Keywords: State ownership; Privatization; Corporate debt; State banks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 F36 G32 G38 H11 H81 L33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17300 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: State ownership and corporate leverage around the world (2025)
Working Paper: State Ownership and Corporate Leverage Around the World (2022)
Working Paper: State Ownership and Corporate Leverage Around the World (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17300

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17300

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().