Our study examines the existence and the nature of private benefits of control in Germany. We do this by analyzing initial public offerings of founding-family owned firms and tracking their fate up to ten years following the IPO. Our sample includes a uniquely rich data set of 105 IPOs of...

Regulations in the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley era allowed corporate insiders considerable flexibility in strategically timing their trades and SEC filings, for example, by executing several trades and reporting them jointly after the last trade. We document that even these lax reporting requirements...

We investigate co-movements and heterogeneity in inflation dynamics of different regions within and across euro area countries using a novel disaggregate dataset to improve the understanding of inflation differentials in the European Monetary Union. We employ a model where regional inflation...

In this paper we assess the implications of sunk costs and product differentiation on the pricing decisions of the multinational firms. For this purpose we use a modified version of Salop's spatial competition. The model yields clear-cut predictions regarding the effects of exchange rate shocks...

The German financial market is often characterized as a bank-based system with strong bank-customer relationships. The corresponding notion of a housebank is closely related to the theoretical idea of relationship lending. It is the objective of this paper to provide a direct comparison between...

Since the second half of the nineties the euro area has been subject to a considerable accumulation of temporary and idiosyncratic price shocks. Core inflation indicators for the euro area are thus of utmost interest. Based on euro area-wide data core inflation in this paper is analyzed by means...

While companies have emerged as very proactive donors in the wake of recent major disasters like Hurricane Katrina, it remains unclear whether that corporate generosity generates benefits to firms themselves. The literature on strategic philanthropy suggests that such philanthropic behavior may...

Securitization is a financial innovation that experiences a boom-bust cycle, as many other innovations before. This paper analyzes possible reasons for the breakdown of primary and secondary securitization markets, and argues that misaligned incentives along the value chain are the primary cause...

This paper reconsiders the effect of investor sentiment on stock prices. Using survey-based sentiment indicators from Germany and the US we confirm previous findings of predictability at intermediate time horizons. The main contribution of our paper is that we also analyze the immediate price...

Deutsche Börse AG plans to introduce a system (Xetra Best) allowing brokers and brokerdealers to internalize the orders of retail customers. Further, Xetra Best supports payment for order flow arrangements. Both internalization and payment for order flow may be detrimental to market quality....