The consequences of international accounting standards are likely to reach beyond the impact on financial statements. This paper demonstrates one of the economic implications of international standards. We focus on the impact of the IFRS regulation on preference shares (IAS 32) in the...

This paper investigates three capital structure decisions leverage, debt maturity and the source of debt in a simultaneous setting. Moreover, we investigate whether these choices are influenced by the involvement of banks in a firm. Our results based on a panel of Dutch firms show that bank...

The use of advanced econometric techniques is becoming more and more standard in risk management and investments. Empirical results are important for, e.g., deriving and evaluating asset pricing models, determining attractive investment strategies or the evaluation of the performance of mutual...

In this paper we analyze the persistence in the performance of hedge funds taking into account look-ahead bias (multi-period sampling bias). To do so, we model liquidation of hedge funds and analyze how it depends upon historical performance. Next, we use a weighting procedure that eliminates...

Believers in the law of small numbers tend to overinfer the outcome of a random process after a small series of observations. They believe that small samples replicate the probability distribution properties of the population. We provide empirical evidence indicating that investors are...

We explore the flow-performance interrelation by explicitly separating the investment and divestment decisions of hedge fund investors. The results show that different determinants and evaluation horizons underlie both decisions. While money inflows are sensitive to past long-run performance,...

The top management of corporations has a major influence on the investments and financing of the firms under their control. According to the economics-based principal-agent theory, managers will maximize their own utility, even at the expense of the shareholders and other stakeholders. The...

We study the restructuring process of small and medium-sized firms in financial distress. We have a unique dataset with firms in the Netherlands that are guided in their restructuring effort by banks. Part of our dataset consists of firms that successfully restructure their operations and...

We analyze the importance of firm-specific and country-specific factors in the leverage choice of firms from 42 countries around the world. Our analysis yields two new results. First, we find that firm-specific determinants of leverage differ across countries, while prior studies implicitly...

We investigate how competitive behavior affects the capital structure of a firm. Theory predicts that the impact of different types of output market uncertainty (in particular, unanticipated shocks in demand and costs) on a firm's leverage depends on the type of competition in an industry. We...