This paper examines whether policymakers, economists at the Israeli Finance Ministry, act in their personal pension decisions in accordance with the rational behaviour assumptions underlying the pension policies they advance. We find that while economists' decisions regarding three other...

This paper evaluates the Morningstar mutual fund ranking system. We find that indeed higher Morningstar ratings are associated with higher returns on the portfolios including respectively five-, four-, three-, two- and one-star funds only (STAR5 to STAR1). We then perform an unconditional and...

In this paper, we employ a registry of legal insider trading for Dutch listed firms to investigate the information content of trades by corporate insiders. Using a standard event-study methodology, we examine short-term stock price behavior around trades. We find that purchases are followed by...

This paper reviews the history of executive compensation disclosure and other government policies affecting CEO pay, and as well surveys the literature on the effects of these policies. Disclosure has increased nearly uniformly since 1933. A number of other regulations, including special taxes...

This paper proposes a theoretical model that incorporates corporate governance into the basic CAPM, where corporate governance affects the disutility of managerial effort and the possibility of managers to divert company resources. It shows that corporate governance affects firms’ stock...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

We develop a simple model of banking regulation with two policy instruments: minimum capital requirements and supervision of domestic banks. The regulator faces a trade-off: high capital requirements cause a drop in the banks’ profitability, while strict supervision reduces the scope of...

This paper studies the impact of a financial transactions tax on a financial market where financial institutions trade with each other. Assets are marked to the market and financial institutions with negative equity are forced out of business. There are two main results: First, if all banks have...

There are, at least, seven aspects relating to financial regulation where the recent, and still current, financial turmoil has thrown up issues for discussion. These include: 1. The scale and scope of deposit insurance; 2. Bank insolvency regimes, also known as ‘prompt corrective action’; 3....

The financial integration in Europe concentrates on cross-border mergers rather than cross-border lending and emphasizes the need for harmonizing bank regulation and supervision. We study the impact of cross-border lending in a theoretical model where banks acquire either hard or soft...