Description
Abstract: The firm dynamics literature has stressed productivity, size, and age effects in firm duration. Understanding the implications of financial state has largely been unexplored because of the lack of quality data on private entrant firms. This paper investigates the role of start-up financial conditions (debt-to-asset ratio) on the duration of entrant manufacturing firms using a unique administrative firm-level database called T2LEAP. The debt-to-asset ratio has an economically and statistically significant effect on firm hazard after controlling for usual covariates and unobserved heterogeneity. Further, a non-monotonic relationship between firm hazard and leverage appears. Firm hazard varies positively with leverage for firms in the top two leverage quintiles, whereas hazard rates fall with leverage in the lower quintiles.