Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, detailed, international sample of buyouts from 1980-2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the...

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model in which firms choose their investment level and their capital structure, trading off the tax advantages of debt against the risk of costly default. The costs of bankruptcy are endogenously determined, as bankrupt firms are forced to liquidate their...

This paper studies the effect of managerial ownership on performance and the determinants of managerial ownership for small and medium-sized private companies. We use a panel of around 1300 firms in the German business-related service sector for the years 1997-2000. Managerial ownership up to...

In a panel data model with fixed effects, possible cross-sectional dependence is investigated in a spatial autoregressive setting. An Edgeworth expansion is developed for the maximum likelihood estimate of the spatial correlation coefficient. The expansion is used to develop more accurate...

We develop non-nested tests in a general spatial, spatio-temporal or panel data context. The spatial aspect can be interpreted quite generally, in either a geographical sense, or employing notions of economic distance, or when parametric modelling arises in part from a common factor or other...

This paper introduces a nonparametric Granger-causality test for covariance stationary linear processes under, possibly, the presence of long-range dependence. We show that the test is consistent and has power against contiguous alternatives converging to the parametric rate T-½. Since the test...

We propose a smoothed least squares estimator of the parameters of a threshold regression model. Our model generalizes that considered in Hansen (2000) to allow the thresholding to depend on a linear index of observed regressors, thus allowing discrete variables to enter. We also do not assume...

Contrary to the classic framework of passive strategies, if investors exploit return predictability through active strategies then there is a tension between the mean-variance frontiers that drive empirical work and the mean-variance preferences that are used in finance theory. We show that...

We propose an econometric model that captures the e¤ects of market microstructure on a latent price process. In particular, we allow for correlation between the measurement error and the return process and we allow the measurement error process to have a diurnal heteroskedasticity. We propose a...