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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This paper analyzes the independence of boards of directors as an optimally chosen, non-contractible behavior. A board behaves loyally to a CEO when it agrees to a negative NPV-pro ject, giving the CEO private benefits. While the CEO benefitsfrom competent directors because they help him make...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...