Assessments of investors' risk appetite/aversion stance via indicators often yields results which seem unsatisfactory (see e.g. Illing and Aaron (2005)). Understanding how such indicators work therefore seems essential for further improvements. The present paper seeks to contribute to this...

We investigate the effect of fiscal institutions such as the strength of the finance minister in the budget process and deficits on interest spreads contained in bond yields of the countries now belonging to the Eurozone. Deficits significantly increase risk premia measured by relative swap...

This paper presents a new approach, based on the Merton model, to decomposing corporate bond spreads into the expected loss, bond risk premium and liquidity premium components. The approach focuses on establishing the bond risk premium using the equity risk premium and the hedge ratio, which are...

This study investigates the development of income-decreasing discretionary expenses surrounding CEO turnovers at banks. We expect incoming CEOs to take an earnings bath during the initial stage of their tenure. For a sample of German banks over the period 1993-2012, we document that (1) incoming...

On the basis of accounting and market data for firms and groups listed on German stock exchanges between 1997 and 2003, we show that the value relevance of R&D information under German accounting standards can be superior to that provided by US-GAAP and IAS. The results, obtained while...

We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of the fitness of national German (German Commercial Code - Handelsgesetzbuch (HGB)) and international (IAS and US-GAAP) accounting information, as well as European patent data to explain the market values of German manufacturing firms. For the...

The German Commercial Code (HGB) allows banks to build visible reserves for general banking risks according to section 340g HGB. These GBR reserves may, in addition to their risk provisioning function, be used to enhance capital endowment, for internal financing, signaling or earnings management...

Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...

Several studies have addressed, with conflicting results, the issue of procyclical effects of loan loss provisions in the past. More recently, the weak performance of incurred loss models in the financial crisis has given rise to a new debate on the sound design of credit risk provisioning...

Foreign exchange rates and capital movements are expected to be closely related to each other as international capital markets become more and more integrated. To account for this fact we construct an index of real effective exchange rates as a weighted average of cross-country asset price...