Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question “how much of the cross-country income variance can be attributed to...

We study rights offerings using a sample of 8,238 rights offers announced during 1995-2008 in 69 countries. Although shareholders prefer having the option to trade rights, issuers deliberately restrict tradability in 38% of the offerings. We argue that firms restrict rights trading to avoid the...

We propose a theory of supervision with endogenous transaction costs. A principal delegates part of his authority to a supervisor who can acquire soft information about an agent's productivity. If the supervisor were risk-neutral, the principal would simply make the better informed supervisor...

Markets reacted strongly to the World Trade Center attacks both in Europe and in the United States. The extent of this crisis was difficult to assess at the time, underlining the need for a specific tool to measure the magnitude of financial crises. A first measure was recently proposed and...

We study the effects of sterilised intervention operations executed on behalf of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) using tick-by-tick transactions data between 1986 and 1995. We extend the preliminary results obtained by Fischer and Zurlinden (1991) by matching these data with intra-day indicative...

This paper investigates the presence of abnormal returns through the use of trading strategies that exploit the predictability of short run stock price movements. Based on historical returns of the largest set of individual securities in the UK stock market examined to date, this paper...

This paper provides evidence that managers adjust firm advertising, in part, to attract investor attention and influence short-term stock returns. First, I show that increased advertising spending is associated with a contemporaneous rise in retail buying and abnormal stock returns, and is...

This paper constructs a time series of annuity rates in the UK for 1957-2002, and examines the pricing of UK annuities, and the relationship between the accumulation and decumulation phases of a defined contribution pension scheme by focusing on the properties of the pension replacement ratio....