This paper studies the short- and long-run announcement effects of declaring compliance with the German Corporate Governance Code (the Code). We examine a unique, hand-collected data set of 317 German listed firms from 2002-2005. First, we present evidence from an analysis of firms compliance...

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...

We study in a general perspective the partial equilibrium incentives and the general equilibrium asset pricing implications of Value-at-Risk (VaR) regulation in continuous time economies with intermediate consumption, stochastic opportunity set, and heterogenous attitudes to risk. Our findings...

We present a geometric approach to discrete time multiperiod mean variance portfolio opti-mization that largely simplifies the mathematical analysis and the economic interpretation of such model settings. We show that multiperiod mean variance optimal policies can be decom-posed in an orthogonal...

The goal of this paper is to assess, for the first time, the empirical impact of "Kaynes' beauty contest", or "higher order belief", on asset price volatility. The paper shows that heterogeneous expectations induce higher order beliefs and that heterogeneous expectation asset pricing models...

We examine the underpricing and long-term performance of a broad set ofSwiss IPOs from 1983 to 2000. The average market adjusted initial return is34.97%. Our results support the ex ante uncertainty hypothesis, the signal-ling hypothesis and, to some extent, the market cyclicality hypothesis...

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...

Natural catastrophes attract regularly the attention of media and have become a source of public concern. From a financial viewpoint, natural catastrophes represent idiosyncratic risks,diversifiable at the world level. But for reasons analyzed in this pap er reinsurance markets are unable to...

The wealth dynamics of insurance companies strongly depends on the success of their investment strategies, but also on liquidity shocks which occur during unfavorable years, when indemnities to be paid to the clients exceed collected premia. An investment strategy that does not take liquidity...

In this paper, we characterize explicitly the first derivative of the Value at Risk and the Expected Shortfall with respect to portfolio allocation when netting between positions exists. As a particular case, we examine a simple Gaussian example in order to illustrate the impact of netting...