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Abstract. The aim of this contribution is to reveal the general practice in corporate financing in the Czech Republic, capital structure choice in particular, by means of comparison with the global data. The comparative study is based on primary data from the Czech Republic obtained via a questionnaire survey, and comparison with the data from various countries in Europe and America published in empirical surveys since 2001. The crux of this comparison is the use of the same questions that were used by Graham and Harvey for the first time in 2001. Unlike the original study, which examined several aspects of corporate finance in a single country, this study is focused on the cross-country comparisons of views on determinants of capital structure. The study revealed both differences and similarities between Czech, American and European companies. As the most important factor affecting the choice of the appropriate amount of debt for Czech respondents was "Financial flexibility", likewise in the other countries. Surprisingly, the tax advantages are not considered to be of a high importance to Czech firms and a striking proportion of respondents have no target debt ratio; such results weren't found by any previous study.

The paper aims to provide up-to-date empirical evidence of relationship between the key indicators of business competitiveness: leverage and corporate performance. The study is based on corporate financial data of selected companies from the Czech Republic within 14 major business sectors according to CZ-NACE which companies published for the year 2014. The results of this study show that leverage (debt ratio) has a substantially negative effect on corporate performance when the return on equity (ROE) is used as an indicator of corporate performance in the Czech Republic over the period covered by the study. The results of the regression analysis confirmed negative relationship between the company profitability and the use of debt in majority of business sectors (Agriculture, fishery, and forestry; Construction, Wholesale and retail trade, repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles; Professional, scientific and technical activities; Administrative and support service activities). The opposite relationship was found in one business sector only (Mining and quarrying) where positive relationship between the company profitability and leverage was confirmed. Among other things, the results of this study confirm that corporate leverage varies across industries.

The attitude of companies towards the use of debt depends on many factors that can be generally called corporate debt policy. This paper deals with the debt policy of companies in Czech Republic, focusing on the factors affecting the appropriate amount of debt and their debt policy in general. The aim of this contribution is to reveal the dominant factors affecting companies in their debt policy decisions and to analyse the possible impact of the selected classifying factors on the firms' responses. The findings of this article are based on the data from the questionnaire survey conducted in 2016 and the subsequent statistical analysis of the responses. The most important factors affecting appropriate amount of debt proved to be financial flexibility and volatility of earnings and cash flows. For deciding on debt policy, the most important factor was insufficiency of internal funds. Statistical analysis revealed several differences in response to debt-policy questions according to the legal form of business, the industrial sector, the company size, and the origin of capital.

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