The paper first develops an economic analysis of the concept of shareholder value, describes its approach and discusses some open questions. It emphasizes the relationship between pledgeable income, monitoring and control rights using a unifying and simple framework. The paper then provides a...

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...

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...

The literature on mergers between private hospitals suggests that such mergers often produce little benefit. Despite this, the UK government has pursued an active policy of hospital mergers, arguing that such consolidations will bring improvements for patients. We examine whether this promise is...

Theory and empirics are ambiguous on the effect of democracy on growth. Cross-country studies find that democracy has no significant impact on growth. In contrast, within-country studies find a strong positive effect of transition to democracy. We reconcile this inconsistency by showing that the...

We discuss the use of event studies in macroeconomics and finance, arguing that many important macro-finance questions can only be answered using event studies with high-frequency financial market data. We provide a broad picture of the use of event studies, along with their limitations. As...