This paper investigates the price and volume behavior around buy, sell and holdrecommendations of Swiss stocks, as published in the major financial newspaper in Switzerland. This represents a random selection of recommendations which have been previously released by banks to their customers....

Momentum strategies based on continuations in stock prices have become increas-ingly popular among academics, money managers, and investors in recent years. While there is little controversy on the profitability of momentum strategies, their implementation is afflicted with many difficulties....

We use a dynamic adjustment model and panel methodology to investigatethe determinants of a time- varying optimal capital structure. Because firmsmay temporarily deviate from their optimal capital structure in the presenceof adjustment costs, we also endogenize the adjustment process. In partic...

Recent empirical work shows that a better legal environment leads to lowerexpected rates of return in an international cross-section of countries. Thispaper investigates whether differences in firm-specific corporate governancealso help to explain expected returns in a cross-section of firms...

Die aktuelle Corporate Governance Literatur stützt die verbreitete Hypothe-se, dass sicht „gute“ Corporate Governance durch eine höhere Unterneh-mensbewertung manifestiert. Die Mehrzahl der empirischen Studien unter-sucht jedoch nur ausgewählte Corporate Governance Mechanismen...

Using a comprehensive set of listed Swiss companies, our findings suggestthat the size of the board of directors is an independent control mechanism.However, in contrast to previous studies, we do not find a significant rela-tionship between board size and firm performance. This suggests that...

This paper presents a valuation model for pension benefit guarantees based on discrete timeapproximations of one and two factor models of the term structure, based on the pricing modelsof Ho and Lee (1986), Hull and White (1994a) and (1994b), and Heath, Jarrow, Morton(1991). It is shown that...