When purchasing a financial product, investors may actively decide upon the risk they take. This paper analyzes the impact of investors' personal characteristics, location-based demographic factors and transaction-specific trading surroundings on their risk taking in the market of speculative...

In almost every financial market crisis we can observe widening credit spreads, especially in the last years during the subprime and sovereign debt crisis. But what exactly drives the credit spread? This paper will outline static components, i.e. default risk, liquidity, risk and the relative...

We develop a way of ranking and scoring actively managed funds and investment strategies. Our performance measure accounts for the feature that investors may exhibit caution, via the mechanism of ambiguity aversion, when evaluating investment strategies. Linking developed theory to data, we...

Modigliani and Miller (M&M) proposed that investors forgo dividends, leaving the money available for reinvestment as retained earnings. This recommendation takes two parts: Proposition III, i.e., a dividend has no impact on market value, and Proposition IV, i.e., that financial policy is of no...

This paper examines contracts and the costs of accessing private markets globally. Contract terms vary by fund region and type. European funds charge lower fees than US funds, but evidence linking regulation to fee compression is weak. Investors’ costs are estimated to be 5% to 26% of...

The advent of blockchain, smart contracts, and Web3 has empowered new concepts for equity partnerships with autonomous operating systems and democratic corporate governance. This paper explores 2,377 of such new partnerships and uses detailed transaction data (from 2017 through 2022) to examine...

This paper addresses the problem of accurately determining buyout opportunity cost of capital for performance analyses. It draws on a unique and proprietary set of data on 133 United States buyouts between 1984 and 2004. For each buyout, we determine a public market equivalent that matches the...

The paper models and analyses the dynamics of credit spread curves based on ratings over the period from 2004 to 2021. Using more than 1.5 million data points of individual bonds, instead of using index data, monthly asset swap spread (ASW) curves are constructed for all rating levels. The paper...

We use machine learning to study how venture capitalists (VCs) make investment decisions. Using a large administrative dataset on French entrepreneurs that covers VC-backed as well as non-VC-backed firms, we use algorithmic predictions of new ventures' success to uncover potential sources of...

The valuation of start-up firms is challenging, yet highly relevant for entrepreneurs and financiers alike. We reverse-engineer fair-value multiples by comparing the firm value at the time of financing with the firm value at the time of exit. Our framework produces reliable valuation multiples...