This dissertation contains three essays concerning two broad areas, namely, optimal capital structure and risky assets modeling. In the first paper, we study corporate debt values, capital structure, and the term structure of interest rates in a unified framework. We employ numerical techniques...

We examine the relationship between analyst research and corporate earnings announcements to explore the relative importance of information discovery versus interpretation of previously released information. Using equity market reaction to capture information content, we find that information...

We investigate the impact of founding family ownership on accounting conservatism. Family ownership is characterised by large, under-diversified equity stake and long investment horizon. These features give family owners both the incentives and the ability to implement conservative financial...

In order to solve the poor performance problem of massive rules reasoning, as well as the inconsistency problem of working memory in distributed rule matching, this article presents the formal definition of interference relations between rules, and proposes a novel approach to distributed rule...