We investigate entropy as a financial risk measure. Entropy explains the equity premium of securities and portfolios in a simpler way and, at the same time, with higher explanatory power than the beta parameter of the capital asset pricing model. For asset pricing we define the continuous entropy as an alternative measure of risk. Our results show that entropy decreases in the function of the number of securities involved in a portfolio in a similar way to the standard deviation, and that efficient portfolios are situated on a hyperbola in the expected return – entropy system. For empirical investigation we use daily returns of 150 randomly selected securities for a period of 27 years. Our regression results show that entropy has a higher explanatory power for the expected return than the capital asset pricing model beta. Furthermore we show the time varying behavior of the beta along with entropy.

We analyze the determinants of capital structure and its choice by small and medium-sized enterprises in Central and Eastern Europe from 2002 to 2007. We test the relevance of the three main theories: the Static Trade-off Theory, the Pecking Order Theory, and the Agency Theory, which have been derived primarily for developed markets, because our knowledge on their validity for emerging European countries is limited. We confirm the positive impact of size and asset tangibility on the leverage, while rejecting both the positive impact of profitability and tax, as well as the negative impact of business risk and non-debt tax shields. We report that SMEs behave homogeneously, and the relevant capital structure determinants show remarkable steadiness. Our results show a special time varying behaviour, in which the relevant determinants become stronger, while most of the country-specific factors present weakening effects. We argue that firms of the CEE countries remarkably converged their financial decision-making procedure to that of developed countries through the investigated period. The relevance of the Trade-off Theory is weak, as firms respect a one-sided upper threshold rather than converging to a fixed target on both sides, while they are not indifferent to the hierarchy of financing alternatives.

This paper analyzes the capital structure and the choice of financing alternatives across a broad sample of Central and Eastern European companies. Our investigation is built on two methods: the first concentrates on capital structure decisions through quantitative information applying panel regression for the period 2005-2008 to allow a closer look at the strength of the pecking order and static tradeoff theories; and the second extends the analysis with a qualitative questionnaire on the explicit and latent preferences behind financing policy. The same set of randomly selected 498 firms that fairly represent size classes and countries by the weight of their economic performance are investigated. The CFOs' answers reflect a pecking order driven behavior, with a limited role for the target leverage ratio; this is confirmed by the estimated coefficients of the panel regression.JEL classification: G32 Keywords: Capital structure; Emerging European countries; Static tradeoff theory; Pecking order theory; AcknowledgementWe have received helpful suggestions from Matjaz Crnigoj and Aaro Hazak and useful comments from participants at the 3rd ECEE Conference in Tallinn (2011). We are grateful to the editor and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments.

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