We use a dynamic framework and panel methodology to investigate the determinants of a firms' time-varying capital structure. Our sample comprises 706 European firms from France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. over the period from 1983 to 2002. If capital structure adjustment is costly, firms may...

We use a dynamic framework and panel methodology to investigate the determinants of a time-varying corporate capital structure. Our sample comprises 706 European firms from France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. over the period from 1983 to 2002. If capital structure adjustment is costly, firms may...

Numerous empirical studies provide evidence on the value relevance of capitalizing expenditures on intangibles such as research & development (Lev and Sougiannis 1996, Hand 2003). However, accounting standards in many countries, such as the U.S. or Germany, prohibit capitalizing these. In this...

Using panel data on large Polish firms this paper examines the relationship between corporatecontrol structures, sales growth and the determinants of employment change during the period 1996-2002. We find that privatised and de novo firms are the main drivers of employment growth andthat, in the...

This paper examines latent risk factors in models for migration risk. We employ thestandard statistical framework for ordered categorical variables and induce dependencebetween migrations by means of latent risk factors. By assuming a Markov process forthe dynamics of the latent factors, the...

This study investigates loss aversion when the reference point is state-dependent.Using a state-dependent structure, prospects are more attractive if they depend positively on the reference point and are less attractive in case of negative dependence. In addition, the structure is neutral in the...

The aim of this paper is to explain why cross-sectional estimated migration correlations displayed in the academic and professional literature can be either not consistent, or inefficient, and to discuss alternative approaches. The analysis relies on a model with stochastic migration in which...

In this paper we explain how to use rating histories provided by the internal scoring systems of banks and by rating agencies in order to predict the future risk of a set of borrowers. The method is developed following the steps suggested by the Basle Committee. To introduce both migration...

We propose a general robust semiparametric bootstrap method to estimate conditional predictive distributions of GARCH-type models. Our approach is based on a robust estimator for the parameters in GARCH-type models and a robustified resampling method for standardized GARCH residuals, which...

In this study new realized volatility measures based on Multi-Scale regression and Discrete Sine Transform (DST) approaches are presented. We show that Multi-Scales estimators similar to that recently proposed by Zhang (2004) can be constructed within a simple regression based approach by...