Market liquidity is the ease of trading an asset. Its risk is the potential loss, because a security can only be traded at high or prohibitive costs. While the omnipresence and importance of market liquidity is widely acknowledged, it has long remained a more or less elusive concept. Treatment...

While in the US stock-based incentives are commonly used since the 50s of the last century, in Germany they were invented only some ten years ago. Even in 1996 firms faced considerable regulatory difficulties when willing to grant such incentives. In the meantime the legal environment has...

We analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that...

Market liquidity risk, the difficulty or cost of trading assets in crises, has been recognized as an important factor in risk management. Literature has already proposed several models to include liquidity risk in the standard Value-at-Risk framework. While theoretical comparisons between those...

This paper investigates the strategy of private equity investors to take public companiesprivate in blockholder-based economies. Drawing on a unique dataset, we providestrong evidence that private equity investors buy companies in order to mitigatepotential agency problems and hence to improve...

It has been frequently discussed, that returns are not normally distributed. Liquidity costs, measuring market liquidity, are similarly non-normally distributed displaying fat tails and skewness. Liquidity risk models either ignore this fact or use the historical distribution to empirically...

We analyse whether family firms differ from non-family firms in terms of business segment and geographical diversification or the application of currency hedging instruments. This analysis is based on a unique dataset of 339 publicly listed companies (1,561 firm years) in the German Prime...

This paper extends research in the field of private equity investments in family firms. It contributes to the literature by fundamentally analyzing the decision criteria of family firm owners for using minority investments of private equity investors. This type of financing might be of great...

We address the question of whether hedge fund and private equity investments in public firms are motivated by corporate governance improvements. As opposed to traditional financial investors both HF and PE are likely to have the incentives to alleviate agency conflicts. However, against the...

We integrate liquidity risk measured by the weighted spread into a Value-at-Risk (VaR) framework. The weighted spread measure extracts liquidity costs by order size from the limit order book. We show that it is precise from a risk perspective in a wide range of clearly defined situations.Using a...