Philip Ernstberger analyses in his three essays different topics of financial pathologies. Thereby, changes in fundamentals as well as information are considered as the driving force for the behavior of speculators and investors. The first essay deals with currency crises, in which the central...

Standard setters have long deliberated the appropriate accounting for goodwill, with ambiguity surrounding its useful life complicating the issue. Recently, the FASB considered mandating a default useful life for goodwill with an option to deviate, but later decided to pause their deliberations...

Financial analyses such as valuation, solvency and capital adequacy play a crucial role in bankruptcy. Over the course of the 20th century, methods of financial analysis in bankruptcy have shifted from earnings multiples to discounted cash flow (DCF) and recently to market-based approaches such...

This thesis lies at the intersection of mathematics, finance and numerical methods. The financial question of how to model credit risk, specifically corporate bond defaults, and how to model correlations between defaults, motivates our study of the mathematics behind a specific kind of credit...