We study the effect of the business cycle on optimal capital structure choice and the benefit to leverage. We propose a regime switching model with a state-dependent cash flow process to capture macroeconomic risk in a firm's cash flow. Our model is parsimonious but still realistic and allows...

Standard equity valuation approaches (i.e., DDM, RIM, and DCF model) are derived under the assumption of ideal conditions, such as infinite payoffs and clean surplus accounting. Because these conditions are hardly ever met, we extend the standard approaches, based on the fundamental principle of...

We analyze the quality of macroeconomic survey forecasts. Recent findings indicate that they are anchoring biased. This irrationality would challenge the results of a wide range of empirical studies, e.g., in asset pricing, volatility clustering or market liquidity, which rely on survey data to...

This paper investigates the returns and flows of German money market funds before and during the liquidity crisis of 2007/2008. The main findings of this paper are: in liquid times, money market funds enhanced their returns by investing in less liquid papers. By doing so they outperformed other...

This paper investigates whether investor sentiment can explain stock returns on the German stock market. Based on a principal component analysis, we construct a sentiment indicator that condenses information of several well-known sentiment proxies. We show that this indicator explains the return...

We analyze trading opportunities that arise from differences between the bond and the CDS market. By simultaneously entering a position in a CDS contract and the underlying bond, traders can build a default-risk free position that allows them to repeatedly earn the difference between the bond...

This paper investigates the dynamics of the term structure of bond market illiquidity premia using data on German bond market segments which differ only with respect to their liquidity. We analyze the interaction between different parts of the term structure and identify economic factors that...

Technical trading strategies assume that past changes in prices help predict future changes. This makes sense if the past price trend reflects fundamental information that has not yet been fully incorporated in the current price. However, if the past price trend only reflects temporary pricing...

This paper conducts a comprehensive asset pricing study based on a unique dataset for the German stock market. For the period 1963 to 2006 we show that two value characteristics (book-to-market equity, earnings-to-price) and momentum explain the cross-section of stock returns. Corresponding...

This paper serves two purposes. First, we introduce a new data set on the German stock market which is publicly available to all researchers. It comprises factor returns (a market factor, a size factor, a book-to-market factor, and a momentum factor) as well as returns of portfolios which are...