Credit risk measurement and management become more important in all financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis and the global recession. This particularly applies to most of the complex structured financing forms whose risk cannot be quantified with com-mon rating...

This paper analyzes the determinants of alternative automobile fuel regulation and developmentsupport with a particular focus on methanol fuel. We find that embedded interests, bureaucraticreforms, and political circumstances in the Chinese national, provincial, and municipalgovernments have all...

Several top deals already closed, a still highly fragmented industry and strong pressure for furtherconsolidation following the financial crisis – renewable energy certainly has become a red-hot topic inM&A. Surveying 220 companies in the solar photovoltaic, utility and financial sector as...

National borders are still strong barriers for mergers and acquisitions inEurope. We estimate a gravity equation model based on NUTS 2-regionsand find that the restraining impact of national borders decreased byabout a third between 1990 and 2007. However, there has been nosignificant change...

Implied Base Correlations of Single-tranche CDOs on standardized Credit Indices such asthe iTraxx Europe have been used in the credit derivatives market for price communication.During the financial crisis, implied correlations have been quite volatile indicating thegrowing fraction of systematic...

The paper confronts different aspects of decentralization: fiscal decentralization, postconstitutionalregulatory decentralization, and constitutional decentralization – using a singledataset from Russian Federation of the Yeltsin period as a politically asymmetric country anda variety of...

In the past two decades, controversial evidence has been produced supporting the case for localprotectionism in China. This paper overviews the most important contributions and presents a newapproach which applies spatial econometrics on prefectural-level data. The main advantage of thismethod...

This paper examines why unsolicited ratings tend to be lower than solicited ratings. Bothself-selection among issuers and strategic conservatism of rating agencies may be reasonableexplanations. Analyses of default incidences of non-U.S. borrowers between January 1996and December 2006 show that...

This working paper surveys theoretical and empirical work about market liquidityand market liquidity risk. It addresses interested practitioners as well asstudents who want to gain a quick overview about the latest progress in researchin market liquidity.

While the regional economic integration encompassing the former Soviet Union (FSU) transpiresto be inefficient, there appears to be a stronger interest in regionalism in smaller groupsof more homogenous and geographically connected countries of the region, specifically, CentralAsia. Using a new...