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KDI 경제교육·정보센터

ENG
  • 경제배움
  • Economic

    Information

    and Education

    Center

최신자료
Contract Enforcement and Young Firm Capital Structure: A Global Perspective
NBER
2026.04.16
We develop a framework to measure the severity of financial constraints for young firms across countries. Using ORBIS balance-sheet data for 23 economies, we show that short-term leverage rises while long-term leverage falls early in firms’ life cycles, with this pattern persisting longer where contract enforcement is weaker. We build a model of optimal financing under limited enforcement with endogenous debt maturity and blueprint capacity that matches these patterns and enables structural measurement of financial constraints. The framework decomposes the funding gap into within-firm borrowing constraints that ease with repayment history and a scale distortion identifiable through cross-country comparisons.