Die Finanzstruktur eines Unternehmens beeinflußt dessen Wettbewerbs verhalten auf dem Gütermarkt. Dieser Sachverhalt wird im Rahmen von industrieökonomischen Oligopolmodellen aufgezeigt, in denen die Aufnahme von Fremdkapital eine strategische Verpflichtung der Unternehmen für eine bestimmte...

On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

This study provides new stylized facts on the determinants of corporate failure and acquisition in Germany. It also offers important lessons for the design of empirical studies. We show that firms experiencing failure or acquisition are significantly different from surviving firms on a number of...

This paper analyses the tax shield under realistic assumptions: no immediate refund and potential corporate bankruptcy for different financing policies. Assuming a German setting, we additionally investigate the impact of the interest ceiling (“Zinsschranke”) introduced by the German Tax...

This paper develops a new model of debt renegotiation in a structural framework, that accounts for both taxes and bankruptcy costs. We investigate situations where the manager can optimally (on behalf of the equity holder) impose a permanent coupon reduction to creditors, given that the new...

This article investigates the impact of the observation that managers can use cash to defer bankruptcy on default risk and corporate financial policies. I show that with managerial cash use to defer default, the impact of cash on default risk depends on two opposing channels. While cash provides...

Theory posits that managerial holdings of debt (“inside debt”) align managers' incentives with those of outside debtholders. Executive pensions, which consist of ERISA-qualified rank-and-file (RAF) plans and Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans (SERPs), and other deferred compensation...

Employees of liquidating firms are likely to lose income and non-pecuniary benefits of working for the firm, which makes bankruptcy costly for employees. This paper examines whether firms take these costs into account when deciding on the optimal amount of leverage. We find that firms with...

This paper documents a set of stylized facts about leverage and financial fragility in the non-financial corporate sector in emerging markets since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Corporate debt vulnerability indicators prior to the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) attributed to corporate...

Corporate leverage responds differently to employees' rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees' rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series,...