There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not.We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times,but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageursliquidity providers in normal times, namely their tolerance...

In a two-country portfolio model with leverage constraints, I focus on private assets in order to understand how their behaviour can justify an expected excess return as well as the flight-to-safety observed in the data. The specific goal is to study how much these phenomena are explained by the...

We study a new class of three-factor affine option pricing models with interdependent volatilitydynamics and a stochastic skewness component unrelated to volatility shocks. Theseproperties are useful in order (i) to model a term structure of implied volatility skews moreconsistent with the data...

The "leverage effect" refers to the well-established relationship between stock returns and both implied and realized volatility: volatility increases when the stock price falls. A standard explanation ties the phenomenon to the effect a change in market valuation of a firm's equity has on the...

Financial leverage increases the expected return on equity. We show that this leverage effect is not only irrelevant for shareholders' present wealth but also for the return on their invest-ments. This result is straightforward if we do not only look at the return on equity but at the return on...

In a typical LBO debt is reduced by a substantial part of the firm’s cash flow. The object of the paper is to analyze whether the tax advantages of this debt transaction plan can be evaluated using the APV or the WACC method. It turns out that none of them is appropriate, and we will provide a...

Nowadays, every textbook on corporate finance uses the WACC approach for valuatingtax savings on interest rates. This approach, going back to Miles and Ezzell (1980), stilllacks the restriction of a constant leverage ratio. In this paper it is shown how the WACC formula has to be modified for an...

This paper develops a principal-agent model of financial contracting in which optimal contracts resemble a combination of debt and equity. When defaulting on debt, the firm is punished by disruption of external funding. Such contracts however, invite rivals to compete more aggressively to...

This study examines how family firm characteristics affect capital structure decisions. In our analysis we disentangle the influence of three distinct components of a family firm: ownership, supervisory and management board activities by the founding family. Thereby, we use a unique panel...

We build a model of the financial sector to explain why adverse asset shocks in good economic timeslead to a sudden drying up of liquidity. Financial firms raise short-term debt in order to finance assetpurchases. When asset fundamentals worsen, debt induces firms to risk-shift; this limits...