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Prior evidence suggests the existence of asymmetric timeliness in the reporting of good and bad news of firms that trade in the Athens Stock Exchange. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether these results are consistent with inferences related to persistence property of earnings for firms that trade in the Athens Stock Exchange.

The research design employs both level regression specification and change regression specification and it is based on pool cross‐sectional regressions. Empirical results after classifying observations are reported based on both the sign of prior period and current period firms' return, while a number of sensitivity tests are employed.

According to prior evidence, bad news is recorded more timely than good news but in an unbiased and non‐conservative way. This implies that earnings shocks of firms with bad news should present persistence. Results from an ex‐ante perspective verify these arguments while results from an ex‐post perspective do not.

In contrast to other studies that report results that, in bad news periods, firms' earnings tend to present lower persistence than firms' earnings in good news periods, because managers conservatively report bad news, this paper focuses on a sample of firms that seems to report bad news in a timely way.

The purpose of this paper is to show that different methodologies may lead to different implications about the validity of the pecking order theory.

Using data from Greek firms as a starting‐point, the paper first investigates whether they follow the financing pattern implied by the pecking order theory and then illustrates that conclusions concerning the pecking order should be carefully shaped by researchers, as the methodology used can be misleading. Two different information sources are used; the first is data derived from the financial statements of the Greek firms listed in the Athens Exchange, while the second comprises the answers to a detailed questionnaire.

It is shown that a negative relationship between leverage and profitability does not necessarily mean that the pecking order financing hierarchy holds. Analysis should not rely solely on the mean‐oriented regression quantitative analysis to test the pecking order theory, as it refers to a distinct hierarchy.

Further research should focus on investigating the reasons that underlie actual firm financing.

The fact that the pecking order is actually a hierarchy makes research in this field more complex. Analysts should consider this special feature of the pecking order approach when analyzing the existence of the pecking order financing pattern. The methodology followed is of crucial importance in the analysis of the existence of the pecking order financing pattern.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to test the pecking order pattern of financing using simultaneously quantitative and qualitative data, and to compare results and conclusions drawn from these two different types of methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the existing literature by examining a number of hypotheses relating to the capital structure decision in relation to the firms’ size, namely by distinguishing among micro, small and medium firms.

The paper examines the hypothesis that the factors determining capital structure are different for firms belonging to different size groups. The authors use a panel data model capturing the dynamic concept of capital structure.

The authors find that whereas the size of the firm does affect how much debt a firm will issue, it does not influence the relationship between the other regressors and debt usage.

The paper examines the small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Does not examine the large firms.

During the last decade there has been a gradually increasing interest shown in the field of SMEs. These enterprises represent important parts of all economies in terms of both their total number and their job offer and job creation. For example, in the European Union (EU), in 2005, SMEs accounted for 99.8 percent of the total number of enterprises operating in EU-27, covering 66.7 of total employment in the non-financial business economy sector.

This paper relates capital structure decision to firms’ size distinguishing them among micro, small and medium firms.

The paper tests differences in capital structure determination among different size groups of enterprises in a dynamic framework for more than one year.

The aim of this study is to isolate the firm characteristics that affect capital structure.

The investigation has been performed using panel data procedure for a sample of 129 Greek companies listed on the Athens Stock Exchange during 1997‐2001. The number of the companies in the sample corresponds to the 63 per cent of the listed firms in 1996. The firm characteristics are analyzed as determinants of capital structure according to different explanatory theories. The hypothesis that is tested in this paper is that the debt ratio at time t depends on the size of the firm at time t, the growth of the firm at time t, its quick ratio at time t and its interest coverage ratio at time t. The firms that maintain a debt ratio above 50 per cent using a dummy variable are also distinguished.

The findings of this study justify the hypothesis that there is a negative relation between the debt ratio of the firms and their growth, their quick ratio and their interest coverage ratio. Size appears to maintain a positive relation and according to the dummy variable there is a differentiation in the capital structure among the firms with a debt ratio greater than 50 per cent and those with a debt ratio lower than 50 per cent. These results are consistent with the theoretical background presented in the second section of the paper.

This paper goes someway to proving that financial theory does provide some help in understanding how the chosen financing mix affects the firm's value.

We know that estimates of terminal value of long‐term investment horizons are biased. Unbiased estimates exist only for investment horizon of one time‐period. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a method based on the arithmetic mean in order to obtain unbiased estimates for the terminal value of long‐term investment horizons.

The method used for the investigation was to employ loss functions or error statistics. Namely, the mean error, the mean absolute error, the root mean squared error, and the mean absolute percentage error was used.

The suggested method produced the closest values to the actual ones than any other suggested averaging method when the authors examined ten‐year investment horizons for Standard & Poor's 500 index and on Dow Jones Industrial index.

Portfolio managers and individual investors may use this paper's suggestion if they wish to obtain unbiased estimates for investment horizons greater than one time‐period.

The suggestion to equate the time‐period of the observed data to the time‐period of the investment horizons is novel and useful to practitioners since it produces unbiased estimates.

Managerial finance (MF) started publication in 1975 and celebrated its 45th anniversary in 2019. The purpose of this study is to provide a bibliometric analysis of MF between 1996 and 2019.

This study uses the Scopus database to analyze the most frequent authors in MF along with their affiliated institutions and countries. It also identifies the most often cited MF articles. This study uses bibliometric indicators to analyze productivity and stature of MF. It also uses such tools as bibliographic coupling, keyword analysis and coauthorship analysis to analyze MF. Further, the study provides a temporal analysis of MF publishing across different ownership periods.

MF publishes between 60 and 70 articles each year and its number of citations steadily grows. Although contributors to the journal come from around the globe, they most often are affiliated with the United States, the United Kingdom and Greece. Temporal analysis of journal's themes reveals that it has expanded its scope from accounting research to a much wider array of finance topics. Bibliographic coupling network analysis shows that major themes published in MF involve stock markets, corporate governance, banking, financial decision-making and initial public offerings.

Due to the unavailability of bibliometric data, the analysis excludes an analysis of MF between 1975 and 1995.

This study provides the first overview of the MF's publication and citation trends as well as its thematic structure. It also suggests future directions that the journal might take.

This study aims to enrich the debate on whether women should continue to be under-represented in the upper echelons of organisations. Evidence arrives from the health-care battlefield and, more specifically, the Greek public hospitals assessed in terms of financial performance.

The whole set of Greek public hospitals operating in 2022 were included in a quantitative approach, whereby financial ratios reflect financial performance, while the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) – Chief Financial Officer (CFO) gender reflects the female representation. Descriptive statistics analysis, t-tests and correlation analysis were performed.

The findings of this study suggest that female CEOs significantly outperformed their male counterparts on liquidity and accounts payable turnover, while female CFOs surpassed males concerning inventory turnover. Contrarily, hospitals with male CFOs achieved higher profitability, but income statements seem self-manipulated thanks to state subsidies and cash accounting techniques. Women appear to focus on those components of financial performance which are better aligned to the social role of public entities, while their contribution to non-financial performance is also underpinned by previous research.

Women’s under-representation in management positions was partially confirmed, as less than 1 / 4 of hospitals appoint a female CEO but circa 7 / 10 of them appoint a female CFO. This could be attributed to stereotypes combined with policy and governance factors. The latter were discussed well in this paper shaping a roadmap towards better gender equality in health-care settings.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this was the first effort to investigate the association between managers’ gender and financial performance in Greek health care.

The aims of the paper are three‐fold: first, to analyse how small and micro firms finance themselves; second, to investigate what their financing preferences are; and third, to explore their opinions on how they evaluate the financing sources and the various obstacles they face in accessing those sources.

The paper uses a sample of Greek small and micro firms, which cover 99.6 per cent of the total number of firms operating in Greece. The data are derived from the answers in a structured questionnaire.

The main conclusions are as follows. Regarding equity financing, firms rely heavily on their own funds and would not raise new equity from sources outside the family; thus, there is a reluctance to use new outside equity (venture capital, business angels, etc.). Regarding debt financing, firms denoted that they would use more debt, specifically long‐term debt, than they currently do. Thus, there are limitations in accessing long‐term debt financing. Regarding grant financing, micro and small firms should be better informed and encouraged more to participate in state grants and co‐financed programs; thus, there is an informational gap in grant financing.

The paper uses a sample of Greek micro and small firms and a survey methodology to tackle the lack of quantitative published data for most small firms in Greece. It incorporates distinct sources of funds that are very important for small firms (family funds, grants provided by the state and micro‐loans). It investigates preferences, not just practices.