Search results

Reviews the literature on the term structure of interest rates. Suggests that low German inflation might lead to idiosyncratic interest rate behaviour in Germany. Tests German government securities’ interest rates from 1981 to 1994 for cointegration, using unit root tests, for a range of maturities. Shows skewness and negative kertosis, and cointegration for German bond yields from one to ten year maturities. Concludes that German interest rates behave like US interest rates.

The objective of this study is to investigate the long‐run performance of initial public offerings (IPOs) in Germany for the period from 1977 to 1995. The paper studies why some IPO firms have substantial positive and others have substantial negative long‐run buy‐and‐hold abnormal returns.

The paper approaches this problem by differentiating the abnormal return patterns by the following criteria: benchmark, year of going public, security design, money raised, market value and magnitude of underpricing.

The empirical findings suggest that the subsequent financing activity in the equity market is the most important factor for determining the future performance of an IPO. This variable separates the out‐performers from the under‐performers. Thus, only successful firms have the opportunity to raise additional funds in the equity market through a seasoned equity offering.

Future research should concentrate on investigating whether the introduction of new stock market segments in Germany has changed the long‐run performance of IPOs.

The results suggest that firms with a superior performance have the opportunity to raise additional equity whereas the poor performers do not get a second chance to sell equity to the public. This means that firms have to earn at least their cost of capital in order to receive additional funding.

Compared to other research, this study explains the significant difference in long‐run performance between two groups of IPOs based on the future financing decision. This finding offers new insights to both academics and practitioners alike.

Before providing an overview of the conference with the above title and this Special Issue, this paper aims to present a view of the meaning of systemic risk, factors that affect systemic risk and measures of systemic risk. Thereafter, the conference presentations and the papers in this issue are summarized.

Characteristics and measures of systemic risk are reviewed. Conference papers and presentations are summarized.

While some aspects of systemic risk of a financial institution can be measured, an important aspect associated with contagion through markets is not easily captured by simple measures.

The conference and the papers in this issue contribute to the policy debate about sources and characteristics of systemic risk.

The purpose of this paper is to relate the fees paid to IPO underwriters to the nature and quality of the services they provide.

Controlling for the characteristics of the firm going public, the risk associated with the offering, and the reputation of the underwriter, the authors study on a sample of Italian IPOs whether a formal commitment by underwriters to provide ancillary services allows them to charge higher fees.

The authors document that asking underwriters to stabilize stock price is costly to the issuer, while to support liquidity is not. The authors’ also show that underwriters stabilize IPOs that really need it, whereas the provision of liquidity support does not seem to be always aligned with the issuer’s interest.

Investigating the Italian underwriting market is instructive for two main reasons. First, the institutional setting in IPOs is similar to most continental European countries, but significantly different from the US market. For instance, allocation policies in US IPOs are discretionary for both retail and institutional investors, while in Europe shares cannot be discretionarily allocated to retail investors. Second, the Italian market offers the opportunity to study the going-public decision outside the typical Anglo-Saxon financial systems. This is of interest because while both the UK and the USA have well-developed equity markets and a related industry of financial intermediation centered on providing equity, our analysis sheds light on financial intermediation of IPOs in a bank-centered system.

Homicide is the most severe form of crime and one that imposes the greatest societal costs. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the homicide circumplex, a set of traits, behaviors, psychological and psychiatric features that are associated with greater homicidal ideation, homicidal social cognitive biases, homicide offending and victimization, and psychopathology that is facilitative of homicide.

Using the data from a near population of federal supervised release offenders from the Midwestern USA, ANOVA, multinomial logistic, Poisson and negative binomial regression models were developed.

Greater homicidal ideation is associated with homicide offending, attempted homicide offending and attempted homicide victimization and predicted by gang activity, alias usage, antisocial personality disorder and intermittent explosive disorder. These behavioral disorders, more extensive criminal careers, African American status and gang activity also exhibited significant associations with dimensions of the homicide circumplex.

Developing behavioral profiles of offenders that exhibit homicidal ideation and behaviors are critical for identifying clients at greatest risk for lethal violence. The homicide circumplex is an innovation toward the goal that requires additional empirical validation.