This paper studies the impact of counter-party default risk of forward contracts on a firm's production and hedging decisions. Using a model of a risk-averse competitive firm under price uncertainty, it derives several fundamental results. If expected profits from forward contracts are zero, the...

This paper investigates the dynamics of the term structure of bond market illiquidity premia using data on German bond market segments which differ only with respect to their liquidity. We analyze the interaction between different parts of the term structure and identify economic factors that...

Many firms face product price risk in foreign currency, uncertain costs in home currency and exchange rate risk. If prices and exchange rates in different countries interact, natural hedges of foreign exchange risk might result. If the effectiveness of such hedges depends on the hedge horizon,...

The German Corporate Governance Code works according to the comply-or-explain principle. One of its recommendations was to publish the remuneration of the members of the executive board on an individual basis. We examine the characteristics of the firms that comply with the code requirement. Our...

Until October 2004 corporate insiders in Germany were required to report trades in the shares of their firm 'without delay'. In practice substantial reporting delays were common. We show that the delays are systematically related to the characteristics of the firm. Delays are longer in...

We analyze the determinants of shareholder participation in the annual shareholders' meeting using a sample of 126 listed German corporations over the period 2004-2006. Participation depends (unsurprisingly) on the ownership structure: it is negatively related to the fraction of voting equity...

Recent empirical research suggests that measures of investor sentiment have predictive power for future stock returns over the intermediate and long term. Given the widespread publication of sentiment indicators, smart investors should trade on the information conveyed by such indicators and...

The overvaluation hypothesis (Miller 1977) predicts that a) stocks are overvalued in the presence of short selling restrictions and that b) the overvaluation increases in the degree of divergence of opinion. We design an experiment that allows us to test these predictions in the laboratory. The...

We analyze the dynamics of liquidity in Xetra, an electronic open limit order book. We use the Exchange Liquidity Measure (XLM), a measure of the cost of a roundtrip trade of given size V. This measure captures the price and the quantity dimension of liquidity. We present descriptive statistics,...