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 analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that...

Around the world (with the U.S. and U.K. as exceptions) concentrated ownership structures and controlling shareholders are predominant even among listed firms. We provide novel empirical evidence how such controlling shareholders, in particular founding families, affect payout policy decisions....

Market liquidity is the ease of trading an asset. Its risk is the potential loss, because a security can only be traded at high or prohibitive costs. While the omnipresence and importance of market liquidity is widely acknowledged, it has long remained a more or less elusive concept. Treatment...

Market liquidity risk, the difficulty or cost of trading assets in crises, has been recognized as an important factor in risk management. Literature has already proposed several models to include liquidity risk in the standard Value-at-Risk framework. While theoretical comparisons between those...

In January 2010 the Deutsche Börse Group introduced two family firm stock indices. Both indices are calculated as price and performance indices and extend the number of investment strategy indices of Deutsche Börse Group. The DAXplus Family is an all-share index whereas the DAXplus Family 30...

Liquidity, the ease of trading an asset, strongly varies between different sizes of stock positions. We analyze this aspect using the Xetra Liquidity Measure (XLM), which calculates daily, weighted spread for impatient traders transacting against the limit order book. For this measure, we have...

We integrate liquidity risk measured by the weighted spread into a Value-at-Risk (VaR) framework. The weighted spread measure extracts liquidity costs by order size from the limit order book. We show that it is precise from a risk perspective in a wide range of clearly defined situations. Using...

Recent research indicates that the majority of listed firms in Germany (and also in many other countries around the world) have a dominant owner rather than being widely-held. Hence, owner-dominated firms comprise an important subset of listed companies. This article introduces the concept of an...

We argue that contingent convertible capital (CoCo-Bonds) might have perverse risk-taking incentives for banks (asset substitution problem) and discourage them from investing in positive NPV projects and issuing new equity in times of crisis (debt overhang problem). Whenever the conversion price...