This paper explores the relationship between risk attitude and asset diversification in household portfolios. We first examine the impact of manifested risk aversion on the total number of distinct assets held in a portfolio (naive diversification). The second part of the paper focuses on a more...

The paper investigates young firms' choice of capital source. Our theoretical model hypothesizes a positive (negative) relation between riskiness of the project (price of venture capital) and receiving informed equity. We test our predictions by employing a unique data set collected by KfW...

The paper focuses on the effects of three different internal bank ratings - Risk-, Property- and Creditworthiness-Rating - on the loan maturity. We use a sample of about 5,000 loans given to sole proprietors and corporate borrowers by two German banks from January 2003 till July 2005. The...

The paper investigates the motives of activity (entry and exit) of Private Equity (PE) investors in European companies. Investment of a PE firm is not viewed unambiguously. First, it is claimed that PE investment is made for the sake of seeking short-term gains by taking control and utilizing...

With banking sectors worldwide still suffering from the effects of the financial crisis, public discussion of plans to place toxic assets in one or more bad banks has gained steam in recent weeks. The following paper presents a plan how governments can efficiently relieve ailing banks from toxic...

In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis is vital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable to the bank's objections regarding the relation of false acceptances (Type I error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitability of Smooth...

The goal of this work is to introduce one of the most successful among recently developed statistical techniques - the support vector machine (SVM) - to the field of corporate bankruptcy analysis. The main emphasis is done on implementing SVMs for analysing predictors in the form of financial...

Competition is claimed to be beneficial in development projects promoting micro and small enterprise finance although there are still some doubts whether these loans can be developed into a profitable business. Actually nothing is known about how many MSE banking units optimally should be...

Informed capital is a crucial ingredient to a well-functioning market for start-up finance, especially in times of difficult market conditions. For bank-based systems, the question regarding which investors actually supply informed capital has not yet been answered. To fill this gap, we conduct...

In this paper we investigate whether small-scale businesses face financial constraints that affect their survival. We develop a model of moral hazard in which financial constraints arise endogenously. The model predicts that higher private assets relax financial constraints and have a positive...