The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteenGerman states (Länder) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of acapital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed incomemarket for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals that...

This paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the UK in July1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on thelargest investor class in the UK, namely pension funds. We analyse the behaviour of share...

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...

It has been frequently discussed, that returns are not normally distributed. Liquidity costs, measuring market liquidity, are similarly non-normally distributed displaying fat tails and skewness. Liquidity risk models either ignore this fact or use the historical distribution to empirically...

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 a...

This paper analyzes and quantifies the idea of model risk in the environment of internal modelbuilding. We define various types of model risk including estimation risk, model risk in distributionand model risk in functional form. By the quantification of these concepts we analyzethe impact of...

Much of the industrialized world is undergoing a significant demographic shift, placing strain on public pension systems. Policymakers are responding with pension system reforms that put more weight on privately managed retirement funds. One concern with these changes is the effect on individual...

This paper describes the rst thorough analysis of the interest risk of German banks on anindividual bank level. We develop a new method that is based on time series of accountingbaseddata to quantify the interest risk of banks and apply it to analyze the German bankingsystem. We find evidence...

This paper investigates politically connected rms in Germany. With the in-troduction of a new transparency law in 2007, information on additional incomesources for all members of the German parliament became publicly available.We nd that members of the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the...