We study product innovation and imitation in the market of corporate underwriting with a dynamic model where client switching costs and the bankers’ expertise in deal structuring characterize the life cycle of a security. While the clientele loyalty allows positive rent extraction, the superior...

This paper studies the impact of cash constraints on equilibrium research intensities in a patent race between a current owner of the “state of the art” technology (the incumbent) and entrants. We develop a simple model, where players need to raise funds from imperfectly informed creditors to...

We are interested in the macroeconomic implications of the separation of ownership and control. An alternative decentralized interpretation of the stochastic growth model is proposed, one where shareholders hire a self-interested manager who is in charge of the firm’s hiring and investment...

When information is costly, a seller may wish to prevent prospective buyers from acquiring information, for the cost of information acquisition is ultimately borne by the seller. A seller can achieve the desired prevention of information acquisition through posted-price selling, by offering...

Recent empirical work shows that a better legal environment leads to lowerexpected rates of return in an international cross-section of countries. Thispaper investigates whether differences in firm-specific corporate governancealso help to explain expected returns in a cross-section of firms...

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...

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...

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 test leverage predictions of the trade-off and pecking order models usingSwiss data. At an aggregate level, leverage of Swiss firms is comparativelylow, but the results depend crucially on the exact definition of leverage.Confirming the pecking order model but contradicting the trade-off...

Have the euro and accompanying measures of financial integration had a discernable impact on the degree of diversification of European investors? This is an empirical question that this paper tries to answer by exploring four alternative avenues. First we focus on the final outcome: If European...