Many tax-codes around the world allow for special taxable treatment of savings in retirement accounts. In particular, profits in retirement accounts are usually tax exempt which allow investors to increase an asset’s return by holding it in such a retirement account. While the existing...

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht, ob der Mehrheitsaktionär einer Gesellschaft im Vorfeld eines Zwangsausschlusses von Minderheitsaktionären (so genannter Squeeze-Out) versucht, die Kapitalmarkterwartungen negativ zu beeinflussen. Ein solches "manipulatives" Verhalten wird häufig in der...

We analyze the board of directors' equilibrium strategies for setting CEO incentive pay and overseeing financial reporting and their effects on the level of earnings management. We show that an increase in CEO equity incentives does not necessarily increase earnings management because directors...

This paper analyzes the risk properties of typical asset-backed securities (ABS), like CDOs or MBS, relying on a model with both macroeconomic and idiosyncratic components. The examined properties include expected loss, loss given default, and macro factor dependencies. Using a two-dimensional...

The objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that in particular financially constrained firms lease a higher share of their assets to mitigate problems of asymmetric information. The assumptions are tested under a GMM framework which simultaneously controls for endogeneity problems and...

The aim of the paper is to study empirically the influence of higher moments of the return distribution on conditional value at risk (CVaR). To be more exact, we try to reveal the extent to which the risk given by CVaR can be estimated when relying on the mean, standard deviation, skewness and...

Stocks are exposed to the risk of sudden downward jumps. Additionally, a crash in one stock (or index) can increase the risk of crashes in other stocks (or indices). Our pape explicitly takes this contagion risk into account and studies its impact on the portfolio decision of a CRRA investor...

Structural positions are very common in investment practice. A structural position is defined as a permanent overweighting of a riskier asset class relative to a prespecified benchmark portfolio. The most prominent example for a structural position is the equity bias in a balanced fund that...