Utilizing a large sample of European firms, we demonstrate that firms behave as if they converge toward a target capital structure (“leveraging process”), defined by traditional trade‐off variables. Moreover, we find that such behavior is evident regardless of firm size and ownership structure. We compare the degree of convergence among different groups of firms and find that medium‐sized firms, firms from the new EU member states, and firms from Southern Europe exhibit a stronger “leveraging process” than the rest of the sampled firms. Our results also highlight that the economic crisis, which began in the late 2008, impacted the leveraging dynamics; however, the general pattern of convergence remained unchanged.

The link between socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnocentric worldviews is well established in the literature, with countless studies showing the effect of SES on a variety of attitudes, preferences, lifestyles, and behaviors. This literature has been revisited in recent studies on the resurgence of the Far Right, with claims of the rise of “working-class populism,” according to which the working class is more likely to identify with right-wing and populist claims. In the post-Yugoslav context, along with the turbulent socioeconomic and political transformation from socialism, research has also shown that “everyday” people’s understandings of themselves and of others are very much stratified by education, occupational status, urban/rural residence, and region, pointing to a marked effect of SES on civic/ethnic identification, attachment to Europe, ethnic exclusivism, and gender/sexual conservatism. Yet, the nature of the link between socioeconomic status and nationalist attitudes is still insufficiently understood. In this article, we go beyond the traditional focus on cultural explanations, instead relying on cross-sectional quantitative survey data to shed light on important class differences in worldviews of people living in Croatia and Serbia. We find that education remains the most robust predictor of nationalist attitudes, while age, gender, income, and religiosity matter to various degrees. We conclude with a discussion on the continuing importance of SES in understanding ethnocentric worldviews, from Brexit and Trump to the former Yugoslavia.

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Author citation and co-citation analysis is a simple, yet powerful educational tool for detecting the most relevant papers from any research field. I demonstrate its use and graphically show a chronological development of capital structure theory, which highlights the most important contributions. I then systematically present the capital structure theory, starting with Modigliani & Miller's irrelevance theorem, and continue with four alternative explanations of firm capital structure behaviour. This paper is particularly useful for PhD students and junior researchers who need to familiarize with the literature of their own research field, and for those, interested in the up-to-date review on capital structure theory.

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