Securitisations usually involve creating multiple tranches of a single issue with different characteristics, placed on the market as separate securities. Various theoretical explanations have been advanced to explain such tranching. This paper provides the first systematic testing of such...

This paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the UK in July 1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on the largest investor class in the UK, namely pension funds. We analyse the behaviour of share prices...

Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, detailed, international sample of buyouts from 1980-2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the...

Authors of the Report on the European Economy 2009

The credit crunch was most likely viewed as a mixed blessing by many private equity executives. On the one hand, it signalled the end of the most favourable set of economic conditions the private equity industry had ever witnessed: abundant capital, low interest rates, increasing stock market...

The financial turmoil that originated in 2007 and developed into an unprecedented crisis battering financial and real markets is the latest manifestation, on a grand scale and with new attributes, of a welldefined pathology in the process of market liberalization and integration in the...

This chapter discusses the current issues of the French economy. It is obviously beyond the scope of this report to discuss all aspects. Our approach is therefore focussed on a central question: What is the current government trying to achieve economically and will it succeed? In order to...