Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the Asian economy. They make up more than 96% of all Asian businesses that provide two out of three private sector jobs in the continent. Therefore, it is vitally important for the Asian economies' economic success that they have...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the Asian economy. They make up more than 96% of all Asian businesses, providing two out of three private-sector jobs on the continent. Therefore, it is vital for Asian economies' economic success that they have fully functioning...

This study seeks to disentangle the human capital and the social capital of directors to improve our understanding of the value that directors bring to their boardroom. Employing social network analysis (SNA) to measure the social capital of directors and using a unique and comprehensive sample...

We study the impact of stronger shareholder control on bondholders. We find that the passage of shareholder-sponsored governance proposals causes a decline in CDS spreads, indicating a net positive effect on bondholders. Evidence suggests that the direct benefit of stronger shareholder control,...

Our study examines whether CEOs’ birth order can predict firms’ credit ratings. Consistent with studies that document a positive relationship in the general population between being firstborn and being conservative, our study finds that firms managed by firstborn CEOs tend to have higher...

This study investigates the transition from being a listed company with a dispersed ownership structure to being a privately held company with a concentrated ownership structure. We consider a sample of private equity backed portfolio companies to evaluate the consequences of the corporate...

Credit risk measurement and management become more important in all financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis and the global recession. This particularly applies to most of the complex structured financing forms whose risk cannot be quantified with com-mon rating...

Credit ratings are ordinal predictions for the default risk of an obligor. To evaluate the accuracy of such predictions commonly used measures are the Accuracy Ratio or, equivalently, the Area under the ROC curve. The disadvantage of these measures is that they treat default as a binary variable...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of most Asian economies. The main obstacle to the development of the SME sector is the lack of stable finance. Considering the bank-dominated characteristic of economies in Asia, banks are the main source of financing, and the lack of a...

In this paper we challenge the view that corporate bonds are always arm's length debt. We analyze the effect of bond ratings on the stock price return to acquirers in M&A transactions, which tend to have significant effects on creditor wealth. We find acquirers abnormal returns to be higher if...