The effects of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are disputed. In this paper, we assess these effects using capital market data and an event-study approach, using a daily data set covering a thousand announcements spanning over eighty economies and a hundred RTAs over twenty recent years. We...

Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in...

This Paper looks at the value generated to shareholders by the announcement of mergers and acquisitions involving firms in the European Union over the period 1998-2000. Cumulative abnormal shareholder returns due to the announcement of a merger reflect a revision of the expected value resulting...

Do exchange rates react to exogenous capital movements? We explore this issue based on the redefinition of the MSCI international equity indices announced on 10 December 2000 and implemented in two steps on 30 November 2001 and 31 May 2002. The index changes implied major changes in the...

There is a substantial theoretical literature on the potential effects of loyalty contracts, but a relative paucity of empirical work. This Paper employs the event study methodology to examine the effect of exclusionary contracts on firm performance in the ocean shipping industry. Shipping...

The Yukos affair, a high-profile story of the state-led assault on a private Russian company, provides an excellent opportunity for an inquiry into the nature of company-specific political risks in emerging markets. News associated primarily with law enforcement agencies’ actions against...

We explore how fiscal consolidations affect private sector confidence, a possible channel for the fiscal transmission that has received particular attention recently as a result of governments embarking on austerity trajectories in the aftermath of the crisis. Panel regressions based on the...

We analyze the reactions of stock returns and CDS spreads of banks from Europe and the United States to four major regulatory reforms in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, employing an event study analysis. In contrast to the public perception that nothing has happened, we find that financial...

Exploring the period since the inception of the euro, we show that secondary-market yields on Italian public debt increase in anticipation of auctions of new issues and decrease after the auction, while no or a smaller such effect is present for German public debt. However, these yield movements...

This study evaluates the macroeconomic effects of Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) announcements by the European Central Bank (ECB). Using high-frequency data, we find that OMT announcements decreased the Italian and Spanish 2-year government bond yields by about 2 percentage points, while...