Access to Finance, Foreign Ownership, and Foreign Takeovers in Germany

John P. Weche and Joachim Wagner (institut_vwl@leuphana.de)

VfS Annual Conference 2014 (Hamburg): Evidence-based Economic Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: With this paper we present the fi rst microeconometric analysis of the impact of a foreign acquisition on the target fi rms' access to fi nance. By using a large database of German firms we furthermore investigate for the first time the link between foreign ownership and access to finance in Germany, one of the world's leading target countries for foreign direct investment. We use newly available comprehensive panel data that we constructed from information collected by the German statistical offi ces and from credit rating scores supplied by the leading German credit rating agency. We find foreign owned firms in German manufacturing on average to show slightly more nancing restrictions than domestically owned enterprises, but this very small di fference diminishes once unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account. We further demonstrate that one reason for this finding is the preference of foreign investors for targets with relatively low credit-worthiness. Although the likelihood of a foreign acquisition appears to be correlated with credit rating, there is no impact of foreign takeovers on the credit constraints of the target fi rms ex post and therefore no support for the hypothesis that foreign takeovers ease financial frictions.

JEL-codes: F21 F23 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/100295/1/VfS_2014_pid_163.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Access to finance, foreign ownership and foreign takeovers in Germany (2015)
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:zbw:vfsc14:100295

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2014 (Hamburg): Evidence-based Economic Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).