How does ESG (environmental, social, and governance) performance affect stock returns? Answering this question is difficult because existing measures of ESG perfor- mance -- ESG ratings -- are noisy and, therefore, standard regression estimates suffer from attenuation bias. To address the bias,...

We analyze proprietary internal capital allocation data from a large retail banking group consisting of member banks and a headquarters organization. We find that capital allocations from headquarters compensate for deposit shortfalls on the bank level, suggesting that the headquarters offers...

We argue that the recent corporate governance reform in the Netherlands provides a natural experiment to explore the impact of changes in corporate governance on financing policy. We find that, relative to a control sample of comparable firms outside the Netherlands, Dutch firms significantly...

We empirically investigate the effect of financial distress on corporate ownership and control. Our analysis is based on a panel of 267 German firms that suffered from repeated interest coverage shortfalls between 1996 and 2004. We track each firm's development over the distress cycle with...

We investigate debt restructurings in Germany for a sample of 116 financially distressed companies. About half of the firms succeed in restructuring their debt in a workout while the others file for bankruptcy. Our evidence suggests that firms which have higher leverage, owe more debt to banks,...