We examine the risk-return characteristics of a rolling portfolio investment strategy where more than six thousand Nasdaq initial public offering (IPO) stocks are bought and held for up to five years. The average long-run portfolio return is low, but IPO stocks appear as ‘longshots’, as...

This Paper constitutes a first attempt to analyse the impact of the emergence of new funds on portfolio decisions of mutual fund managers who are evaluated on the basis of relative performance. Recent theoretical literature has pointed to the inefficiencies in portfolio selection caused by...

There is now extensive empirical evidence showing that fund managers have relative performance objectives and adapt their investment strategy in the last part of the calendar year to balance their performance in the early part of the year. However, emphasis was put on returns in excess of some...

This paper provides a broad empirical examination of the major currencies' roles in international capital markets, with a special emphasis on the first year of the Euro. A contribution is made as to how to measure these roles, both for international financing as well as for international...

Using a data-set that provides unprecedented details on individual investors’ stockholdings, we analyse whether investors take into account corporate governance when they select stocks. After controlling for the supply effect via free float and other firm characteristics, we find that all...

We analyze incentives to develop entrepreneurial ideas for venture capitalists (VCs) and incumbent firms. If VCs are sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs acquire valuable ideas, develop them beyond the level...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

This paper investigates the effects of international diversification of banks on the value of their M&A advice. We study bidder returns to 1,253 cross-border M&A announcements. We find that acquirers engaging a more internationally diversified financial advisor generate lower excess returns....