We report on the current state and important older findings of empirical studies on corporate credit ratings and their relationship to ratings of other entities. Specifically, we consider the results of three lines of research: The correlation of credit ratings and corporate default, the...

This paper documents the conglomerate discount for all available German firms and the DAX 30 firms in detail. It shows a moderate discount of about 0.06 based on German comparable firms and of about 0.20 for a combined sample of German and European peer groups. I further examine the relationship...

Surveys of corporate risk management document that selective hedging, where managers incorporate their market views into firms’ hedging programs, is widespread in the U.S. and other countries. Stulz (1996) argues that selective hedging could enhance the value of firms that possess an...

There are legal grounds to hear competitors in merger control proceedings, and competitor involvement has gained significance. To what extent this is economically sensible is our question. The competition authority applies some welfare standard while the competitor cares about its own profit. In...

In their joint framework project, the FASB and the IASB recently proposed dropping stewardship as a separate objective of financial accounting, because the Boards view stewardship and valuation usefulness as compatible sub-objectives ranking under an overall objective of decision usefulness....

The purpose of this study is to extend the current understanding of business divestiture by investigating its potential for triggering strategic reorientation. A divestiture involving strategic reorientation is here denoted as a strategic business exit, otherwise it is a status quopreserving...

We analyze the impact of CDS trading on bank syndication activity. Theoretically, the effect of CDS trading is ambiguous: on the one hand, CDS can improve risksharing and hence be a more flexible risk management tool than loan syndication; on the other hand, CDS trading can reduce bank...

We propose the systemic risk beta as a measure for financial companies’ contribution to systemic risk given network interdependence between firms’ tail risk exposures. Conditional on statistically pre-identified network spillover effects and market and balance sheet information, we define...

Many of the concepts in theoretical and empirical finance developed over the past decades – including the classical portfolio theory, the Black- Scholes-Merton option pricing model or the RiskMetrics variance-covariance approach to VaR – rest upon the assumption that asset returns follow a...