Companies' investments in research and development (R&D) are usually associated with better growth opportunities incorporated in the firms' market valuation. This study focuses on the question how does the firms' market value attributable to R&D investments depend on the firms' ability to employ...

This paper uses a simple model of mean-variance asset pricing with transactions costs to analyze one of the main empirical phenomena in stock market competition in the last years, the decrease of transaction costs. We endogenize transactions costs as variables strategically influenced by stock...

This paper presents a theoretical study of how incentives affect hedge fund risk and returns and an empirical study of the performance of a large group of operating hedge funds. Most hedge fund managers receive a flat fee plus a share of the returns above a certain benchmark. We investigate how...

International evidence on the accrual anomaly is sparse and conflicting. Testing for accrual mispricing in 28 equity markets, we provide statistical evidence for anomalous returns in some countries. However, we question whether this result might have occurred by chance alone and that it might...

Demand is growing for a better understanding of how assets are priced in countries outside of the U.S.While financial data are available for many firms world-wide, it is important to have a reliable andreplicable method of constructing high-quality systematic risk factors from these data. This...

We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that arepoorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but havestrong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global fac-tors are jointly signicant predictors of bond returns, where...

We explore the pricing of variance risk by decomposing stocks' total variance into systematicand idiosyncratic return variances. While systematic variance risk exhibits a negative priceof risk, common shocks to the variances of idiosyncratic returns carry a large positive riskpremium. This...

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...

We introduce and study no-good-deal valuation bounds defined in terms of expected utility. A utility-based good deal is a payoff whose expected utility is toohigh in comparison to the utility of its price. Forbidding good deals induces, viaduality, restrictions on pricing kernels and thereby...

We introduce a new analytical approach to price American options. Using an explicit and intuitive proxy for the exercise rule, we derive tractable pricing formulas using a short-maturity asymptotic expansion. Depending on model parameters, this method can accurately price options with...