The trade-off theory on capital structure is tested by modelling the capital structure target as the solution to a maximization problem. This solution maps asset volatility and loss given default to optimal leverage. By applying nonlinear structural equation modelling, these unobservable...

Woman suffrage led to the greatest enfranchisement in the history of the United States. Before World War I, however, suffrage states remained almost exclusively confined to the American West. The reasons for this pioneering role of the West are still unclear. Studying the timing of woman...

Normal distribution of the residuals is the traditional assumption in the classical multivariate time series models. Nevertheless it is not very often consistent with the real data. Copulae allows for an extension of the classical time series models to nonelliptically distributed residuals. In...

Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central...

Financial risk control has always been challenging and becomes now an even harder problem as joint extreme events occur more frequently. For decision makers and government regulators, it is therefore important to obtain accurate information on the interdependency of risk factors. Given a...

This paper discusses empirical evidence on the economic consequences of mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the European Union (EU) and provides suggestions on how future research can add to our understanding of these effects. Based on the explicitly...

Basel II Pillar 3 reports provide information about banks' exposure towards a number of risk factors, such as corporate credit risk and interest rate risk. Previous studies nd that the quality of such information is likely to be weak. We analyze the marginal contribution of pillar 3 exposure...

The mandatory adoption of IFRS by many countries worldwide fuels the expectation that financial accounting information might become more comparable across countries. This expectation is opposed to an alternative view that stresses the importance of incentives in shaping accounting information....

At the peak of the financial crisis in October 2008, the IASB amended IAS 39 to grant companies the option of abandoning fair value recognition for selected financial assets. Using a comprehensive global sample of publicly listed IFRS banks, we find that banks use the reclassification option to...

Confidence intervals and joint confidence sets are constructed for the nonparametric calibration of exponential Lévy models based on prices of European options. This is done by showing joint asymptotic normality for the estimation of the volatility, the drift, the intensity and the Lévy...