Capital Structure in French Family Firms After COVID-19: A Pecking Order Reassessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine how firms finance deficits when cash is tight, focusing on French private family firms and the COVID-19 period. In an under-studied, bank-based setting (France, 2003–2024), we reassess whether pecking-order behavior is stronger under family control and whether the gap with non-family firms widened after 2020. We find that family firms consistently use debt to bridge shortfalls, whereas comparable non-family firms rely less on new borrowing; this difference increases post-COVID, in line with policy-driven easing of bank credit and the importance of relationship lending. The amplification is stronger in credit-intensive sectors and for firms with deeper bank ties. The results, presented without strong causal claims, connect control preservation and intermediation to marginal financing choices and highlight a policy trade-off between short-run stabilization and later deleveraging.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".