This paper presents a new method to detect informed trading activities in the options markets.An option trade is identified as informed when it is characterized by an unusual largeincrement in open interest and volume, induces large gains, and is not hedged in the stock market.For the period...

A common method of valuing the equity in leveraged transactions is the flows-to-equity method whereby the free cash flow available to equity holders is discounted at the cost of equity. This method uses a standard definition of equity free cash flow, but the cost of equity varies over time as...

Using a new data set of small public firms in Germany, this paper analyzes the incentive and entrenchmenteffects associated witrh mangerial equity owernership. The relationship between firm value and insider ownership is found to be nonlinear: at low levels of ownership firm value is positive...

This paper tests two competing hypotheses about the influence of financial institutions as large shareholders on the performance of their industrial portfolio firms: the superior monitoring hypothesis versus the rent extraction hypothesis. The methodology of this study exploits the abolishment...

This paper analyzes the interaction between financial leverage and takeover activity. We develop a dynamic model of takeovers in which the financing strategies of bidding firms and the timing and terms of takeovers are jointly determined. In the paper, capital structure plays the role of a...

This paper examines the unification of non-voting preference shares into a one share one vote structure using a sample of all German dual-class companies from 1987 until 2003. We test several hypotheses with regard to the reasons for the abolition of preference shares.First, as the separation of...

In this study new realized volatility measures based on Multi-Scale regression and Discrete Sine Transform (DST) approaches are presented. We show that Multi-Scales estimators similar to that recently proposed by Zhang (2004) can be constructed within a simple regression based approach by...

In this study new realized volatility measures based on Multi-Scale regression and Discrete Sine Transform (DST) approaches are presented. We show that Multi-Scales estimators similar to that recently proposed by Zhang (2004) can be constructed within a simple regression based approach by...

In this paper, we use a unique hand-collected dataset to analyze stock listing as an entrepreneurial decision. By comparing mainland Chinese entrepreneurial firmslisted in Hong Kong with the same type of firms opting for a domestic listing on the Shenzhen second board market, we argue that the...