This paper provides new evidence that taxes affect capital structure choice, using a unique and comprehensive panel data set which covers 86,173 German non-financial firms over the years 1973-2008. Following the Graham methodology to simulate marginal tax rates, we find a statistically and...

The benefits of family ownership and control of firms are at the center of the family firm debate. Previous studies have used either family ownership or management as proxies for control. Both indicators are off the mark, as they do not measure decision control as intended by the theory of the...

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht, welche Faktoren einen Einfluss auf die Beurteilung der Zahlungsfähigkeit eines Unternehmens haben. Dazu werden zwei empirische Untersuchungen durchgeführt. Zunächst wird geklärt, welche makroökonomischen Faktoren und unternehmensspezifischen Kennzahlen...

In almost every financial market crisis we can observe widening credit spreads, especially in the last years during the subprime and sovereign debt crisis. But what exactly drives the credit spread? This paper will outline static components, i.e. default risk, liquidity, risk and the relative...

Most traditional Value at Risk models neglect market liquidity risk and hence only consider the market price risk (i.e. risk associated with holding a certain position). In order to fully capture the market risk associated to holding and trading a position, we first define market liquidity risk,...

The credit crisis and the following sovereign debt crisis during 2007 and 2012 led to an increasing volatility of European corporate bond credit spreads. European investment grade credit spreads rose in 2007 and 2008 from 50 BP to over 350 BP. In the years after the credit spreads declined to...

The globalisation on financial markets and the development of financial derivatives has increased not only chances but also potential risk within the banking industry. Especially market risk has gained major significance since market price variation of interest rates, stocks or exchange rates...

The emergence of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) and some spectacular investments of these funds in recent years have caused widespread attention on international financial markets. Most SWFs are domiciled in Arabian countries, East Asia and Russia. Their low transparency led to concerns that SWFs...

We analyze the treatment and impact of idiosyncratic or firm-specific risk in regulation. Regulatory authorities regularly ignore firm-specific characteristics, such as size or asset ages, implying different risk exposure in incentive regulation. In contrast, it is common to apply only a single...

Do firms select their main bank relationship according to their risk or risk preferences? Relationship banking is attractive for high risk firms since it improves their access to finance and provides liquidity insurance. Low risk firms instead may not want to bear the additional costs. I employ...