News consumers in many authoritarian countries read government-controlled sources even when independent sources are available. We test whether these choices reflect a preference for pro-government coverage versus persistent tastes for specific websites. We exploit textual data from news...

The paper aims at explaining empirically the diffusion of E-commerce based on two largescale sample surveys conducted in the Swiss economy. The paper adds to previous work in two ways: firstly, we estimate separate models for E-selling and E-purchasing, and, secondly, we distinguish between...

We apply different matched-pair methods to evaluate the policy of sustaining the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies by Swiss firms and we compare it in decomposing the selection bias. In this aim we present the evaluation problem, the decomposition of the selection bias and the...

When there is uncertainty about a CEO's quality, news about the firm causes rational investors to update their expectation of the firm's value for two reasons: Updates occur because of the direct effect of the news, and also because news leads investors to update their assessment of the CEO's...

We define annual shareholder meetings as contentious if one or more ballot items are likely to obtain sufficient shareholder votes to induce a firm to implement governance changes. Using a sample of almost 28,000 meetings between 2003 and 2012, we find that abnormal stock returns over the 40-day...

We evaluate whether management risk, coming from uncertainty about management's value added, affects firms' default risks and debt pricing. We find that, regardless of the reason for the turnover, CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all increase at the time of management turnover,...

The paper aims at a joint analysis of inter-firm and intra-firm diffusion of technology, taking as an example E-selling and E-purchasing. The analysis is based on an encompassing model of diffusion, drawn from the literature, which is extended by considering technology-specific obstacles and...

The present paper estimates and decomposes the employment effect of innovation by R&D intensity levels. Our micro-econometric analysis is based on a large international panel data set from the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. Employing flexible semi-parametric methods - the generalised...