Two important characteristics of current European equity markets are rooted in changes in financial regulation (the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive). The regulation (i) allows new trading venues to emerge, generating a fragmented market place and (ii) allows for a substantial fraction...

This paper adds to the literature dealing with the effect of derivatives trading on underlying securities by examining option listings from the Netherlands. The effects on both stock returns and volatility are investigated using three types of samples, namely, listing of call options alone,...

In cross-border acquisitions, the differences between the bidder and target corporate governance have an important impact on the takeover returns. Our country-level corporate governance indices capture the changes in the quality of the national corporate governance regulations over the past 15...

Abstract: We study the relation between liquidity in financial markets and post-trading fees (i.e. clearing and settlement fees). The clearing and settlement agent (CSD) faces different marginal costs for different types of transactions. Costs are lower for an internalized transaction, i.e. when...

Integrated financial markets provide opportunities for expansion and improved risk sharing, but also pose threats of contagion risk through cross-border exposures. This paper examines cross-border contagion risk over the period 1999-2006. To that purpose we use aggregate cross-border exposures...

We investigate the relative importance of country and industry factors as determinants of international equity returns in the Euro-zone over the period 1990 to 2003.We conduct our analysis from a portfolio performance perspective, using mean-variance spanning and efficiency tests as well as...

Although there is a broad literature on structural credit risk models, there has been little empirical testing of these models.In this paper we examine the term structure of credit spreads on euro corporate bonds and the empirical validation of structural credit risk models.The latter provide a...

In this paper, we examine whether mandatory adoption of IFRS influences the flow of firm-specific information and contributes to stock price informativeness as measured by stock return synchronicity. Using a constant sample of 1,904 mandatory IFRS adopters in 14 EU countries for the period...