In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis is vital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable to the bank's objections regarding the relation of false acceptances (Type I error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitabil- ity of Smooth...

In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis is vital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable to the bank's objectives regarding the relation of false acceptances (Type I error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitability of smooth...

In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis is vital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable to the bank's objections regarding the relation of false acceptances (Type I error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitability of Smooth...

Using a unique large panel of German firms, we examine whether participation in business groups (Konzerns) reduces the sensitivity of investment to cash flow. The main finding is that the investment sensitivity is significantly reduced for small firms. On the other hand, we do not find clear...

Using data from Germany this paper examines the direct effect of non-financial firms' use of short-term versus long-term liabilities. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that profitability of the firm will change if firms alter their use of...

It is still an open question what kind of smart capital relational investors actually supply. We divide smart capital into several components and conduct a survey among 85 German suppliers of start-up finance. The results show that the degree of "smartness" is determined by the financial product...

This paper studies gender discrimination against entrepreneurs by financial institutions. Based on the cross-country Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) our analysis suggests that, compared to male-managed counterparts, female-managed firms are less likely to obtain a...

We propose a semiparametric factor model, which approximates the implied volatility surface (IVS) in a finite dimensional function space. Unlike standard principal component approaches typically used to reduce complexity, our approach is tailored to the degenerated design of IVS data. In...

Sex-related homicides tend to arouse wide media coverage and thus raise the urgency to find the responsible offender. However, due to the low frequency of such crimes, domain knowledge lacks completeness. We have therefore accumulated a large data-set and apply several structural learning...