We investigate the takeover strategies of high default risk acquirers and their value impact. We find that these bidders select bigger, less profitable and unrelated targets, pursue transactions during recessions, and pay with shares by offering target shareholders high premiums. Their long-term...

We estimate and test several default risk models using new and unique data on corporate defaults in the German stock market. While defaults were extremely rare events in the 1990s, they have been a characteristic feature of the German stock market since the early 2000s. We apply the structural...

An important research question examined in the credit risk literature focuses on the proportion of corporate yield spreads attributed to default risk. This topic is reexamined in the light of the different issues associated with the computation of transition and default probabilities obtained...

The value premium is the empirical observation that low market/book “value” stocks have higher returns than high market/book “growth” stocks. In this paper, we report evidence that there is a value premium for firms in financial distress despite the anomalous observation that firms in...

Standard credit risk models cannot explain the observed clustering of default, sometimes described as "credit contagion." This paper provides the first empirical analysis of credit contagion via direct counterparty effects. We examine the wealth effects of bankruptcy announcements on creditors...

In recent years, a number of papers have established a new empirical regularity. Stocks of distressed firms vastly underperform those of financially healthy firms. It is not necessary to attribute the negative excess returns of distressed firms to inefficient or irrational markets. We show that...

Our study examines whether financial distress risk is systematic risk using twelve portfolios sorted by size, book-to-market, and leverage and a portfolio of distressed firms covering an 18-year period. It also tests the explanatory power of the risk factors that best capture default risk. The...

We analyse interactions of simultaneous shifts in comprehensive balance sheet items annually and identify common (latent) factors, which are consistent across years. Five factors are interpreted to reflect five major decisions in businesses: Financial Flexibility, Short-term Credit, Long-term...

We estimate a cross-sectional model of the yield spreads of German Mittelstand bonds as a function of liquidity measures as well as a number of variables that control for both the characteristics of the issuing firm and the bond characteristics. Our results show a significant positive effect of...