Does higher office always lead to more favoritism? We argue that firms may lose their benefit from a connected politicians ascent to higher office, if it entails stricter scrutiny that may reduce favoritism. Around close Congress elections, we find RDD-based evidence of this adverse effect that...

Equity rights offerings and their respective announcement effects have been studied extensively in the literature. Our study expands upon these studies and focuses on those announcement effects and the relation between the discount of an equity rights offering and the announcement effect....

It is a widely known theoretical derivation, that the firm’s leverage is negatively related to volatility of stock returns, although the empirical evidence is still outstanding. To empirically evaluate the leverage we first complement previous simulation studies by deriving theoretical...

In this paper, we evaluate firm-, industry- and country-specific factors determining a firm's capital structure. The empirical validity of several capital structure theories has been ambiguous so far. We shed light on the main drivers of leverage and depict differences in industry and country...

In recent years the market for asset backed securities (ABS) has shown a rapid growth. In an ABS transaction assets are first pooled and then securities backed by this pool are issued. In many cases, several tranches of securities differing with respect to their priority of payment are designed....

We investigate the relationship between corporate and country sustainability on the cost of bank loans. We look into 470 loan agreements signed between 2005 and 2012 with borrowers based on 28 different countries across the world and operating in all major industries. Our principal findings...

This study aims to investigate the effect of bond issuance announcements and to determine the company characteristics that could influence this effect. The findings reveal positive cumulative average abnormal returns following bond issuances, indicating that the market considers bond offers to...

The aim of this paper is to explore the determinants of firms' financial policies according to the manager's psychological characteristics. More specifically, it examines the links between emotional intelligence, decision biases and the effectiveness of firms' financial policies. The article...

Unternehmensgründer stehen bei der Finanzierung ihrer Investitionsprojekte oftmals vor Problemen, zum Beispiel wenn Kapitalgeber diese Projekte aufgrund mangelnder Sicherheiten und schwer einzuschätzender Erlöserwartungen nicht finanzieren. Dadurch können auch an sich vorteilhafte Projekte...

On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.