This paper examines whether financial buyers are more likely to initiate takeovers of inefficient firms. We show that they indeed are and thus conclude that takeovers by financial buyers play a potentially beneficial role in the allocation of corporate assets in the US. economy. Our analysis of...

The studies in this two-volume work shed new light on the range and viability of the emerging corporate governance institutions in the transitional economies of Central Europe. Regional specialists and experts on corporate governance in advanced economies examine the emerging forms of ownership...

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, credit migration matrices, used in many credit risk and pricing applications, are typically assumed to be generated by a simple Markov process. Based on empirical evidence, we propose a parsimonious model that is a mixture of (two) Markov chains, where...

We give a counterexample to the Strong Bang-Bang Conjecture according to which any 3 - 3 embeddable matrix can be expressed as a product of six Poisson matrices. We exhibit a 3 - 3 embeddable matrix which can be expressed as a product of seven but not six Poisson matrices. We show that an...

We explore how general economic conditions impact defaults and major credit rating changes by fitting reduced-form Cox intensity models with a broad range of macroeconomic and firm-specific ratings-related variables. For all corporate issuers in the period 1981–2002 we find both types of...