This thesis investigates the determinants of the use of debt and leasing in the UK using a comprehensive measure of debt and leases, in recognition of the link between lease and debt-type financing decisions, based on financial contracting theory and the tax advantage hypothesis. The design of...

This thesis comprises of three essays. The first essay is titled 'Do Acquiring Firms Manage Earnings?' and is co-authored with Professor Anand M. Vijh. The second essay is titled 'Do Firms Have a Target Leverage? Evidence from Credit Markets' and is joint work with Professors Anand M. Vijh and...

This thesis presents and compares the performance of two recently developed classification methods namely the Spatial Stagewise Aggregation procedure and Support Vector Machines. Both techniques are convenient for the application to corporate bankruptcy analysis, in terms of calculation of...

Apart from an extensive survey of the literature on the economics of corporate bankruptcy law, this thesis contains three own contributions: First, a model is presented where a firm's manager acquires some private information about whether a firm should be liquidated or stay in business....

The study measures farm credit risk by using farm records collected by Farm Business Farm Management (FBFM) during the period 1995-2004. The study addresses the following questions: 1) whether farm’s financial position is fully described by the structure model, 2) what are the determinants of...

Essays in Empirical Finance: Evaluating Risk in FinancialMarketsBy Alysa V. ShcherbakovaThis dissertation is comprised of two parts, each addressing animportant type of financial risk. The first part is composed of anessay discussing Market Risk. This essay examines a causalrelationship between...

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Untersuchung der Bedeutung der Spezifikation für Ratingmodelle zur Prognose von Kreditausfallwahrscheinlichkeiten. Ausgehend von dem in der Bankenpraxis etablierten Logit-Modell werden verschiedene Modellerweiterungen diskutiert und hinsichtlich ihrer Eigenschaften...