Financial theory creates a puzzle. Some authors argue that high-risk entrepreneurs choose debt contracts instead of equity contracts since risky but high returns are of relatively more value for a loan-financed firm. Conversely, authors who focus explicitly on start-up finance predict that...

In this paper, we apply Ridge Regression, the Lasso and the Elastic Net to a rich and reliable data set of condominiums sold in Berlin, Germany, between 1996 and 2013. We their predictive performance in a rolling window design to a simple linear OLS procedure. Our results suggest that Ridge...