The number of non-U.S. firms listing their equity on U.S. stock exchanges has increased dramatically. While non-U.S. firms may seek U.S. listings for a variety of reasons, we focus on one often-mentioned motive, namely, that a U.S. listing enhances access to external capital markets. We document...

The rational expectations hypothesis is supported if rational expectations are stable with respect to reasonable learning procedures. We consider the Stochastic Gradient-Algorithm as a boundedly rational learning procedure in an univariate ARX-Model with forecast feedback. We prove that whenever...

We investigate the relationship between ownership structure and the volume of trade and returns of firms on days where the absolute value of the market's return is large, defined to be two percent or more. We find three main results. First, there is an abnormally high turnover in firm's shares...

The traditional view of stock splits as cosmetic transactions that simply divide the same pie into more slices is inconsistent with the significant wealth effect associated with the announcement of a stock split. Streetlore attributes the price reaction to improved liquidity. The empirical...

CEO compensation has been much debated in the 1990s, both in academic circles and in the media. We contrast two views on CEO compensation. The first view is that there has been a very positive trend in CEO compensation - that compensation committees have become more responsive to shareholder...

In 1992-1993, the SEC required enhanced disclosure on executive compensation and Congress enacted tax legislation, i.e. Internal Revenue Code Section 162(m), limiting the deductibility of non-performance related compensation over one million dollars. We examine the effects of these regulatory...

We study 120 rights offerings by closed-end funds over 1988-1998. On average, rights offerings are announced when funds trade at a premium. This premium turns into a discount over the course of the offering. The premium decline is more severe when the increases in investment advisor's...

The links between interest rates, cost of capital, hurdle rates, and capital allocation have been remarkably weak during the last few years. For instance, whereas the current yield on the World Government Bond Index is a paltry 1.2%, survey evidence suggests that the median reported investment...