Using a sample of highly (over-)leveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings, we show that reducing a debt overhang leads to a significant improvement in operating performance (return on assets, net profit margin). In particular, a reduction in leverage leads to a decrease in overhead costs, wages, and input costs, and to an increase in sales. Changes in leverage in the debt restructurings are instrumented with Unexpected Snow, which captures the extent to which a ski hotel experienced unusually good or bad snow conditions prior to the debt restructuring. Effectively, Unexpected Snow provides lending banks with the counterfactual of what would have been the ski hotel's operating performance in the absence of strategic default, thus allowing to distinguish between ski hotels that are in distress due to negative demand shocks ("liquidity defaulters") and ski hotels that are in distress due to debt overhang ("strategic defaulters").

The purposes of this study were to determine the consistency of subjective ratings among four professional judges and between those judges and wearers of four fabric series nightgowns. The fabrics included: (1) 100% polyester brushed knit; (2) 100% nylon knit; (3) 80/20% acetate-polyester brushed knit and (4} 80/20% acetate-nylon brushed knit. Data were collected from 55 women who each wore and cared for two garments of differing fiber contents and evaluated them on eight performance characteristics. The consumers rated the fabrics on the following characteristics: soil removal, colorfastness, shape retention, appearance, hand, durability and static. An overall rating was obtained by combining data for the above seven factors. The gowns were also evaluated by four professional raters on the above factors. An overall rating was also determined for these judges. Weighted kappa and z scores were used to measure agreement between judge pairs and between each judge and the wearers for the eight factors. The researcher accepted the hypothesis that rater agreement exceed that expected by chance for all judge pairs on all factors except shape retention. However, for one judge-pair the hypothesis of agreement was not accepted for shape retention. The hypothesis of rater agreement was rejected for each of the judges and the wearers on all factors except overall rating. The hypothesis of agreement was accepted for Judge III and the wearers for the overall rating. The consumers were generally more lenient than the professionals in their evaluations of all fabric characteristics except static electricity. The judges were less critical than the wearers in assessing that factor. / Master of Science

Structures in the study area, from southeast to northwest, are the Blacksburg synclinorium, Poplar Hill anticline, Saltville fault, Spruce Run syncline, Clover Hollow anticline, and Johns Creek syncline. The folds are believed to have had their inception by early Middle Ordovician time. The Knox-Middle Ordovician unconformity is well expressed on the Poplar Hill and Clover Hollow anticlines. The contact between the Knox Group and Middle Ordovician is less well defined in the Spruce Run syncline. The character of the unconformity and depositional thickening of the Middle Ordovician limestones in the Spruce Run syncline were caused by compressional downwarping. Comparison of the Middle Ordovician limestones of the Giles synclinorium with those of the Blacksburg and Salem synclinoria to the southeast suggests that the Giles synclinorium subsided before or faster than the southeastern synclinoria during early Middle Ordovician time. Colluvium, which covers about 10 percent of the area, is the result of great mass-wasting which may have begun as early as Late Cretaceous time. Dominant contributors to the colluvium are the Silurian Tuscarora, Rose Hill, and Keefer sandstones. Northwest ridge slopes are extensively covered with colluvium as compared to southeast ridge slopes. Moisture content and temperature, as well as topography, appears to have a strong influence on colluvial development. / Master of Science

We evaluate the external effects of 183 large mergers at the market level by assessing the impact on the main competitors of the merging firms. Using synthetic control groups and difference in difference estimation, we find that the return on assets of rival firms increases significantly after a merger. The size of the effect varies strongly with market characteristics and the intensity of competition.

This paper studies five mergers in the European wireless telecommunication industry and analyzes their impact on prices and capital expenditures of both merging carriers and their rivals. We find substantial heterogeneity in the relationship between increases in concentration and carriers' prices. The specifics of each merger case clearly matter. Moreover, we find a positive correlation between the price and the investment effect; when the prices after a merger increase (decrease), the investments increase (decrease) too. Thus, we document a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency of mergers.

This paper applies an intuitive approach based on stock market data to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four maintained assumptions, merger control might be interpreted to be effective if rents accruing due to the increased market power observed around the merger announcement are reversed by the antitrust decision, i.e. if there is a negative relation between announcement and decision abnormal returns. To clearly identify the events' competitive effects, we explicitly control for the market expectation about the outcome of the merger control procedure and run several robustness checks to assess the role of our maintained assumptions. We find that only outright prohibitions completely reverse the rents measured around a merger's announcement. On average, remedies seem to be only partially capable of reverting announcement abnormal returns. Yet they seem to be more effective when applied during the first rather than the second investigation phase and in subsamples where our assumptions are more likely to hold. Moreover, the European Commission appears to learn over time. (authors' abstract)

This note proposes the continuous treatment approach as a valuable alternative to propensity score matching for evaluating economic effects of merger and acquisitions (M&As). This framework allows considering the variation in treatment intensities explicitly, and it does not call for an arbitrary definition of cutoff values in traded ownership shares to construct a binary treatment indicator. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach using data from European M&As and by relying on the example of post-M&A employment effects. The empirical exercise reveals some heterogeneities over the whole distribution of acquired ownership shares and across different types of M&As and country groups.

This paper presents empirical evidence about the ability of event studies to capture mergers' ex-post profitability as measured by accounting data. We use a sample of large horizontal concentrations during the period 1990-2002 involving 482 firms either as merging firms or competitors, and contrast a measure of the mergers' profitability based on stock market event studies with one based on balance sheet profit data. We show that using a long window around the announcement date (25 or 50 days before the event) increases the ability to capture the ex-post merger effect: the pairwise correlation coefficient is positive and highly significant.

This paper provides an evolutionary perspective on financial systems based on complex systems theory. This perspective is used to organize the discussion about the convergence and non-convergence of financial systems. In recent years the discussion about the relative merits and the efficiency of market- and bank-based financial systems is subject to considerable academic and policy debate throughout the world. Bank- and market-based systems are found to give rise to different economic and corporate dynamics. Based on a notion of financial systems as configuration of complementary elements, it is suggested that the convergence of financial systems is best conceptualized as path dependent process of institutional change. This is illustrated with special reference to the recent developments of convergence of financial systems in Europe. The implication of the evolutionary perspective on financial systems is that neither theories using a simple evolutionary argument of survival of the fittest nor theories related to a institutional ossification perspective can provide much guidance for analyzing the transformations of financial systems. A multilevel institutional analysis which takes the interdependencies between national and firm-level institutions explicitly into account is required. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

This study aims to investigate how legal origin and cultural values can affect the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the cost of equity. Specifically, common law and civil law countries (legal origin) and countries with high long-term orientation are compared. The research is conducted by using panel data of 5,533 firm-year observations from 1,492 unique firms during a sample period of 2005 through 2013. The findings suggest that firms with better CSR performance will enjoy lower cost of equity. Furthermore, there is strong evidence in support of the corporate governance practices of CSR performance, which leads to cheaper equity financing. In addition, the findings support previous literature that the negative relationship between CSR and the cost of equity is stronger for civil law countries.