The aim of this study is the analysis of so called socially responsible investments (SRI). First, the performance of SRI equity investment funds and equity indices is investigated using Jensen´s alpha as performance measure. The analysis considers market timing strategies of the fund management...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...

This paper empirically examines price formation in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). Our analysis shows that unexpected allocations of European Union Allowances (EUAs) lead to pronounced price reactions of the expected signs. Moreover, we find evidence that the adjustment of...

A sizeable literature reports that financial market analysts and forecasters herd for reputational reasons. Using new data from a large survey of professional forecasters' expectations about stock market movements, we find strong evidence that the expected average of all forecasters' forecasts...

This paper presents an analysis of pension funds' performance in Poland and Hungary, two Central European countries characterized by strong regulation of their private pension fund industries. Thus, the paper extends the literature which has so far mostly focused on performance of pension fund...

Specific industry factors determining cross-border business set-up in the European mutual fund industry are analyzed to contribute to the understanding of production specificities in the financial industry. The findings indicate that the decision on where to domicile a fund is not primarily...

Following the ambiguous results in the literature aimed at understanding the empirical link between fiscal federalism and economic growth, this paper revisits the question using a Bayesian Model Averaging approach. The analysis suggests that the failure to appropriately account for model...

We document using the ZEW panel of German stock market forecasters that weak forecasters tend to be overconfident in the sense that they provide extreme forecasts and their confidence intervals are less likely to contain eventual realizations. Moderate filters based on forecast accuracy over...

Drawing on a novel dataset of worldwide venture capital deals, we investigate how venture capitalists (VCs) overcome the complexity of investing in geographically and institutionally distant regions. Our results indicate that syndicating with local VCs is a common way for foreign VCs to gain...

Since the mid-1990s, countries offering tax systems that facilitate international tax avoidance and evasion have been facing growing political pressure to comply with the internationally agreed standards of exchange of tax information. Using data of German investments in tax havens, we find...