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...

We suggest a simple asset market model in which we analyze competitive and strategic behavior simultaneously. If two-fund separation is found to hold across periods for competitive behavior, it also holds for strategic behavior. In this case the relative prices of the assets do not depend on...

Several authors have shown that there exists a significant relationship between the term structure of interest rates and future changes in the rate of inflation. More recently, this relationship has been strengthened through the introduction of nonlinearities and regime shifts. This paper...

Empirical investigations of analysts forecast surveys concerning earnings realizations find significant time varying biases usually attributed to the analysts liability to cognitive limitations. For example, a positive autocorrelation of analysts forecast errors is commonly explained by...

No, not really. Responding to lingering concerns about the reliability of SVARs, Christiano et al (NBER Macro Annual, 2006, “CEV”) propose to combine OLS estimates of a VAR with a spectral estimate of long-run variance. In principle, thiscould help alleviate specification problems of SVARs in...

Two well-known, but seemingly contradictory, features of exchange rates are thatthey are close to a random walk while at the same time exchange rate changesare predictable by interest rate differentials. In this paper we investigate whetherthese two features of the data may in fact be related....

We develop a tailor made semiparametric asymmetric kernel density estimator for the estimation of actuarial loss distributions. The estimator is obtained by transforming the data with the generalized Champernowne distribution initially fitted to the data. Then the density of the transformed data...

Survey and option data are used to take a fresh look at the equity premium puzzle.Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data suggests that investors perhaps overestimate the volatility of equity...

We compare the forecasts of Quadratic Variation given by Realized Volatility (RV) and Two Scales Realized Volatility (TSRV) computed from high frequency data in the presence of market microstructure noise, under several different dynamics for the volatility process and assumptions on the noise....

Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) has recently been discussed in the financial literature as an effective way to account for model uncertainty. In this paper we compare BMA to a new model uncertainty framework introduced by Yang (2004), called Aggregate Forecasting Through Exponential Reweighting,...