The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

The paper explores factors that influence the design of financing contracts between venture capital investors and European venture capital funds. 122 Private Placement Memoranda and 46 Partnership Agreements are investigated in respect to the use of covenant restrictions and compensation...

The main objective of the present paper is to disentangle observed differences in the design of contracts across VC types into firm selection effects and corporate governance differences between VC types (different contracts). Based on a theoretical approach developed in the first part of the...

The effects of public policy programs which aim at internalizing spill-overs due to successful innovation are analyzed in a sequential double-sided moral hazard doublesided adverse selection framework. The central focus lies in analyzing their impact on contract design. We show that in our...

When liquidity plays an important role as in times of financial crisis, asset prices in some markets may reflect the amount of liquidity available in the market rather than the future earning power of the asset. Mark-to-market accounting is not a desirable way to assess the solvency of a...

This paper documents and studies sources of international differences in participation and holdings in stocks, private businesses, and homes among households aged 50+ in the US, England, and eleven continental European countries, using new internationally comparable, household-level data. With...