This study analyzes the impact of regional economic conditions on stock returns. I identify all U.S. states that are economically relevant for a firm through textual analysis of annual reports and construct a novel proxy for regional economic activity. Using this proxy, I find that economic...

The paper studies the effects of anticipated earnings announcements on liquidity before the earnings announcement day, utilizing full limit order book data. We find very convincing supportive evidence of deteriorating liquidity due to the increase in information asymmetry, which is in line with...

This paper documents that ECB announcements increase the stock market volatility in the euro area (EA) on the same day. I consider two volatility measures from January 1998 to May 2019. First, a realized volatility measure uses intraday data for 8 different stock market indices. Second, a range...

We analyze the market reaction to the sentiment of the CEO speech at the Annual General Meeting (AGM). Adapting a finance-specific German dictionary based on Loughran and McDonald (2011), we find that CEO speeches' textual sentiment is significantly related to abnormal stock returns and trading...

The number of firm bankruptcies is surprisingly low in economies with poor institutions. We study a model of bank-firm relationship and show that the bank?s decision to liquidate bad firms has two opposing effects. First, the bank receives a payoff if a firm is liquidated. Second, it loses the...

We investigate financial intermediaries interest rate risk management as the simultaneous decision of on-balance-sheet exposure and interest rate swap use. Our findings show that both decisions are substitute risk management strategies. Hausman exogeneity tests indicate that both decisions are...

The time-continuous discrete-state Markov process is a model for rating transitions. One parameter, namely the intensity to migrate to an adjacent rating state, implies an ordinal rating to have an intuitive metric. State-specific intensities generalize the state-stationarity. Observing Markov...

Capital reallocation from unprofitable to profitable firms is a key source of productivity gain in an innovative economy. We present a model of credit reallocation and focus on the role of banks: Weakly capitalized banks hesitate to write off non-performing loans to avoid a violation of...

We analyze how regional quality affects firm’s efficiency by identifying the impaired firms receiving financial assistance as those paying an implicit interest rate lower than the prime rate. Then, we decompose them into: real impaired firms unable to repay their loans, and those not repaying...