Open Access

The German market for corporate bonds has experienced an unprecedented growth over the last decade. As a growing number of German firms have seized the opportunity to issue debt securities to the market, the need arises to evaluate their attempts to provide bondholders with private corporate information. This doctoral thesis centers on a research interest concerning the extent and effectiveness of corporate disclosure directed at the German bond market. It delivers unprecedented insights into bondholder relations practices and is thought to establish this topic as a research field that is complementary to previous work on shareholder-related disclosure. Taking information asymmetries between firms and bondholders as a basis, the empirical analyses are based on various arguments from the voluntary disclosure theory as well as from principal-agency and related frameworks. In essence, most parts of the thesis follow the key assumption that bondholders demand higher premiums for opaqueness and potentially detrimental behavior on behalf of a bond issuer’s management. The analyses deliver new insights into the role of corporate disclosure and close a gap between bondholder relations and financial as well as shareholder-related disclosure. They contribute to the stream of research that is concerned with corporate disclosure and its relationship to the cost of capital, the cost of debt, and even more specifically the yield (spread) of corporate bonds.