type="main" <p>In 2008 the German government enacted a measure designed to curb excessive leverage in LBOs by limiting tax-deductible interest to 30% of EBITDA. And in the U.S., legislators are currently reviewing several regulatory measures, including limits on tax-deductible interest, that are...</p>

Conglomerate discounts or premia are derived by comparing market values of conglomerates with the market values of a matched portfolio of stand alone firms (the imputed value of the conglomerates). Usually this comparison is based on firm values. We show that in this case conglomerate discounts...

The terminal value generally reflects a substantial portion of a firm's market value. Stable growth models are usually used to estimate terminal values. We use a simple model of a firm to derive a valuation function for the terminal value in the presence of inflation. Our model reveals that...

In this paper we aim to verify the existence of costs of financial distress (cfd) for a sample of German CDAX firms using an ex-post approach originally due to Opler/Titman (1994). In contrast to this US-based study we do not find a significant interaction between high leverage and distress for...

We study the certification role of fairness opinions in corporate transactions in a simple non-cooperative setting with asymmetric information and possibly misaligned managerial incentives, and discuss the effect of different regulatory scenarios. Specifically, we compare three settings: one in...

The Berger and Ofek (1995) excess value measure, comparing a conglomerate’s actual market value to an imputed value based on standalones, has become the standard method to determine value effects of diversification. In this paper, we address a significant bias in this procedure stemming from...