An Empirical Investigation of the Credit Rationing Hypothesis

We analyze the impact of corporate governance structures on access to capital using a unique and rich panel data for a large and representative sample of Estonian firms over the period 1993 through 1999. We distinguish among five different governance structures and provide estimates on the impact of each of them on capital constraints. Our results indicate that: (i) separate regimes exist in investment behavior; (ii) the likelihood of being financially constrained is higher in firms that are recently privatized, small and where ownership is concentrated in the hands of insiders; (iii) soft budget constraints lower the probability of a firm being financially constrained; (iv) the actual probabilities of operating in the financially constrained regime are calculated to be quite high and essentially stable during 1993-1999: 0.52-0.57 for state owned firms, 0.40-0.46 for domestic owned firms and 0.53-0.57 for employee owned firms. Corporate Investment, Corporate Governance, Liquidity Constraints, GMM Estimates, Switching Regression