We apply control rights theory to explain the structure and determinants of financial covenants in private equity backed leveraged buyouts. We analyze 130 German transactions from 2000 to 2008, covering about 40 percent of the LBO market during this period. We consider Germany to be a superior...

Using recently collected data on Finnish small businesses, we provide evidence that the debt capacity of growth options, defined as the amount of debt that firms optimally raise for an incremental project, is negative, especially in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. We...

We apply control rights theory to explain the structure and determinants of financial covenants in private equity backed leveraged buyouts. We analyze 130 German transactions from 2000 to 2008, covering about 40 percent of the LBO market during this period. We consider Germany to be a superior...

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...

Standard factor pricing models do not capture well the common time-series or cross-sectional variation in average returns of financial stocks. We propose a five-factor asset pricing model that complements the standard Fama and French (1993) three-factor model with a financial sector ROE factor...

We use a proprietary dataset to explore (i) the financial covenant structure and (ii) the determinants of their restrictiveness in leveraged buyouts. With respect to (i) we find that the covenant structure is more standardized in sponsored than in non-sponsored loans: the former show less...

This study examines the influence of a firm's geographical location on corporate debt and provides evidence that the higher cost of collecting information on firms distant from urban areas has significant implications on a wide array of corporate debt characteristics. We find that rural firms...

We examine the factors that influence public firms' choice between project financing and corporate financing. Using a sample of 15,191 syndicated deals closed between 2000 and 2016, we find that economies of scale, agency costs of debt, and information asymmetry arguments affect the choice of...