Capital Structure Determinants in Family Firms: An Empirical Analysis in Context of Crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the capital structure of family firms in a context of crisis. Specifically, it aims to discover whether and how the determinants of their capital structure have a different impact on firms’ leverage before and during the recent global financial crisis. Considering the pecking order theory (POT), trade-off theory (TOT), and agency theory (AT), this study analyzes 1,502 Italian medium family firms comparing the pre-crisis (2005-2007) and crisis (2008-2010) periods. This research shows that that current liquidity, asset structure, and agency costs are the most important variables in influencing medium family firms' leverage, in both the pre-crisis and crisis periods. Moreover, during the crisis, agency costs increase and have a negative influence on the short-term leverage highlighting that crisis contingencies influence the agency-based effects on family firm's leverage. Furthermore, our findings highlight that a more exhaustive understanding of family firms’ capital structure can be achieved through the combined use of different theories.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".