Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in Asian economies as they contribute to high shares of employment and output. However, SMEs generally have limited access to finance compared to large enterprises. Given the bank-dominated financial systems in Asia, banks are the...

Many have argued that financial statements created under an accounting model that measures financial instruments at fair value would not fairly represent a bank's business model. In this study we examine whether financial statements using fair values for financial instruments better describe...

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) bear some responsibility for the financial crisis that started in 2007 and remains ongoing. This is acknowledged by policymakers, market participants, and by the agencies themselves. It soon became clear that, given the depth of the crisis, CRAs would not be able to...

This paper argues that special purpose vehicles, SPVs, are two-edged financial constructs whose bad edge consists in conveying opaque governance, whereas its good one amounts to interesting financial engineering. Firstly, the notion of opaque governance is highlighted, to focus next on SPVs and...

In this paper we challenge the view that corporate bonds are always arm's length debt. We analyze the effect of bond ratings on the stock price return to acquirers in M&A transactions, which tend to have significant effects on creditor wealth. We find acquirers abnormal returns to be higher if...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...