Contributions in Merlin

The asset class of Private Equity was introduced to the public when the book “Barbarians at the Gate” was released by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in 1990. Back then, the Private Equity industry was mainly focused on leveraged buyouts with the goal of splitting companies into piec-es and sell off these pieces to other market participants. This LBO wave of the late 1980s and early 1990s was driven by cheap debt and attempts to recreate returns as in the case of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Over the years, the Private Equity industry evolved from a rather niche market to a main player by increasing raised capital from roughly $240bn per year in 2000 to more than $1´400bn in 2021. In the light of relatively high management fees and performance fees for Private Equity funds, the question remains, if the liquidity risk premia are being compensated and if the fund performance follows a pattern, which might be predictable. Also, the two main private capital strategies, Private Equity and Venture Capital, might have dif-ferent development paths and predictors which could lead to different observable performance indicators. With the help of a major Private Equity-database this study answers the question, if there is a performance difference between Private Equity funds and public markets and if we can predict ex-post Private Equity (buyout) performance with ex-ante, relative neutral, predictors. We conclude that there is a significant overperformance of Private Equity funds in rela-tion to public markets, which ultimately compensate the liquidity risks involved. However, we are not able to identify significant, across the board, ex-ante predictors for ex-post performance of these funds.

We show that lenders charge higher interest rates for mortgages on properties exposed to a greater risk of sea level rise (SLR). This SLR premium is not evident in short-term loans and is not related to borrowers’ short-term realized default or creditworthiness. Further, the SLR premium is smaller when the consequences of climate change are less salient and in areas with more climate change deniers. Overall, our results suggest that mortgage lenders view the risk of SLR as a long-term risk and that attention and beliefs are potential barriers through which SLR risk is priced in residential mortgage markets.

Are firms that are managed and owned by females-only appraised differently than those where genders mix at the top? To answer this question, we study 7,467 small and medium-sized firms from 22 countries. We find that – when borrowing from banks – firms that are both managed and owned by females more often report binding credit constraints and higher interest rate payments than male-only firms; differences that we can attribute to taste-based discrimination. In contrast, if the manager and the owner have a different gender, we find no such differences with male-only firms. Hence, interestingly banks seem to assume that women invariably play second fiddle in the mixed-gender firms. We also show that discrimination between female-only and other firms disappears from economically more developed regions and from credit markets that are more competitive or dominated by transactional lenders.

This paper investigates the divergence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings based on data from six prominent ESG rating agencies: Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini (KLD), Sustainalytics, Moody’s ESG (Vigeo-Eiris), S&P Global (RobecoSAM), Refinitiv (Asset4), and MSCI. We document the rating divergence and map the different methodologies onto a common taxonomy of categories. Using this taxonomy, we decompose the divergence into contributions of scope, measurement, and weight. Measurement contributes 56% of the divergence, scope 38%, and weight 6%. Further analyzing the reasons for measurement divergence, we detect a rater effect where a rater’s overall view of a firm influences the measurement of specific categories. The results call for greater attention to how the data underlying ESG ratings are generated.

Childhood obesity has adverse health and productivity consequences and it poses negative externalities to health services. To shed light on the role of parents, we elicit parental beliefs about the returns and the persistence of a healthy diet and exercise routine in childhood. Parents believe both types of investments to improve child and adult health outcomes. Consistent with a model of taste formation, parents believe that childhood health behaviors persist into adulthood. We show that perceived returns are predictive of health investments and outcomes, and that less educated parents view the returns to health investments to be lower. Our descriptive evidence suggests that beliefs contribute to the socioeconomic inequality in health outcomes and the intergenerational transmission of obesity.

Testosterone has been hypothesized to promote sexual motivation and behavior. However, experimental evidence in healthy humans is sparse and rarely establishes causality. The present study investigated how testosterone affects delay of gratification for sexual rewards. We administered a single dose of testosterone to healthy young males in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-participant design (N = 140). Participants underwent a sexual delay discounting task, in which they made a choice between a variable larger-later option (i.e., waiting longer to view a sexual picture for a longer duration) and a smaller-sooner option (i.e., waiting for a fixed shorter period of time to view the same picture for a shorter duration). We found that testosterone administration increased preference for the smaller-sooner option and induced steeper discounting for the delayed option. These findings provide direct experimental evidence that rapid testosterone elevations increase impulsivity for sexual rewards and represent an important step towards a better understanding of the neuroendocrine basis of sexual motivation in humans.

Les placements durables ont plutôt bien résisté aux crise spassées.Il en va différemment avec celle liée à l'Ukraine et ses répercussions, qui ont quelque peu relégué la problématique environnementale.

Information-Centric Network (ICN) architectures, such as Named Data Networking (NDN), can improve content delivery on the Internet by deploying in-network caching techniques. Replacing the entire established Internet with a novel architecture is a non-trivial task, which is why this work develops a layered network architecture consisting of several smaller NDN-based mobile networks (resp., domains), interconnected using a Distributed Hash Table (DHT)-based network running as an overlay on top of existing Internet infrastructures. Using simulations, we model real-world network characteristics to evaluate the proposed architecture’s performance successfully.

People with visual impairments use assistive technology, e.g., screen readers, to navigate and read PDFs. However, such screen readers need extra information about the logical structure of the PDF, such as the reading order, header levels, and mathematical formulas, described in readable form to navigate the document in a meaningful way. This logical structure can be added to a PDF with tags. Creating tags for a PDF is time-consuming, and requires awareness and expert knowledge. Hence, most PDFs are left untagged, and as a result, they are poorly readable or unreadable for people who rely on screen readers. STEM documents are particularly problematic with their complex document structure and complicated mathematical formulae. These inaccessible PDFs present a major barrier for people with visual impairments wishing to pursue studies or careers in STEM fields, who cannot easily read studies and publications from their field. The goal of this Ph.D. is to apply artificial intelligence for document analysis to reasonably automate the remediation process of PDFs and present a solution for large mathematical formulae accessibility in PDFs. With these new methods, the Ph.D. research aims to lower barriers to creating accessible scientific PDFs, by reducing the time, effort, and expertise necessary to do so, ultimately facilitating greater access to scientific documents for people with visual impairments.

ESG-Anlagen haben in Krisen gut abgeschnitten. Bei der Ukraine-Krise sieht es anders aus.