Budget forecasts have become increasingly important as a tool of fiscal management to influence expectations of bond markets and the public at large. The inherent difficulty in projecting macroeconomic variables – together with political bias – thwart the accuracy of budget forecasts.We...

We propose a new approach to model high and low frequency components of equity correlations. Our framework combines a factor asset pricing structure with other specifications capturing dynamic properties of volatilities and covariances between a single common factor and idiosyncratic returns....

We evaluate the influence of measurement error in analysts' forecasts on the accuracy of implied cost of capital estimates from various implementations of the ‘implied cost of capital' approach, and develop corrections for the measurement error. We document predictable error in the implied...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced — or has failed to influence — federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH...

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...

The question of predictability of credit spreads is of more than just academic interest. The ability to generate unerring spread forecasts is of considerable practical relevance for both treasurers of companies, who want to finance themselves through bonds, and institutional investors, who must...

This paper examines the performance of two commonly applied bankruptcy prediction models, the accounting ratio-based Altman Z-Score model, and the structural Distance to Default model which currently underlies Morningstar's Financial Health Grade for public companies (Morningstar 2008)....