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This study aims to measure impact of several firm-specific factors on alternative measures of leverage. The authors also aim to study impact of the subprime crisis on such associations.

The authors utilized an unbalanced panel data of 973 firm-year observations on 47 UK listed non-financial firms for the years 1990–2019. Book-based and market-based long-term and total leverage measures have been used as explained variables. The explanatory variables are profitability, size, two measures of growth, asset tangibility, non-debt tax shields, firm age and product uniqueness. Fixed effect and random effect models with clustered robust standard errors have been utilized for data analysis. To find the effect of subprime crisis, original dataset was split to create pre-crisis and post-crisis datasets.

The authors find that profitability significantly reduces leverage while firms having more tangible assets use significantly more debt in capital structure. Firm size and non-debt tax shield have statistically insignificant positive impact on leverage. Having more unique products reduces use of external debt, albeit insignificantly. Growth, when measured as market-to-book ratio, has inconsistent impact, whereas capital expenditure insignificantly reduces leverage. Age is found to be an insignificant predictor of leverage. After the subprime crisis, firms started relying more on internal fund instead of external debt, more particularly short-term debt. Having more collateral is gradually becoming more important for availing external debt.

Data limitations restrict generalization of the findings.

This is one of the pioneering attempts to show how subprime crisis altered the theoretical domain of capital structure research in the UK.

This paper aims to empirically investigate the factors attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows into emerging economies.

This study uses secondary data from the World Bank and the Global State of Democracy Indices of 16 West African countries (WACs) over the period from 1989 to 2018. Fixed- and random-effects econometric regression models are used to assess the nexus between 12 macroeconomic indicators (including political risk and cultural factors) and FDI inflows into WACs.

The critical drivers of FDI inflows into WACs are the richness of natural resources, market size or gross domestic product (GDP), imports and exports of goods and services, trade openness and the currency's strength as measured by the exchange rate. The result also reveals that French-speaking countries attract more FDI than other English-speaking countries. The previously cited determinants of FDI, such as infrastructural development, inflation, tax and political stability, are insignificant in determining FDI inflows into WACs.

This study uncovers the critical drivers explaining the FDI inflows into WACs, where FDI accounts for 39% of external finance. The study's contribution is that Francophone WACs attract more FDI than Anglophone WACs. The most important drivers of FDI are abundant natural resources, GDP, imports, exports, trade openness and exchange rate.