This dissertation analyzes how asset performance relates to inflation based on 50 countries and 60 years of data. The three key findings are: a nonlinear behavior of bills, bonds, and equities against inflation, the demystification of listed infrastructure as inflation hedge, and, finally, a...

The question why firms voluntarily forgo considerable portions of their debt capacity is puzzling financial economists. Across a wide range of industries and countries, empirically observed equity ratios are significantly higher as expected by classical capital structure theories. A potential...

We examine how production flexibility affects financial leverage. A worldwide sample of energy utilities allows us to apply direct measures for production flexibility based on their power plants. We find that production flexibility increases financial leverage. For identification, we exploit...

In this paper we propose a measure of systemic risk in the financial sector, the Expected Systemic Shortfall (ESS) indicator. The ESS-indicator is the product of the probability of a systemic default event and the expected tail loss in case this systemic event occurs. We compute the...