Should capital cost calculation be based on a global or local market benchmark? The December 2000 redefinition of the global MSCI equity index was a natural experiment addressing this question. It is argued that this event triggered a portfolio shift (by index funds) large enough to affect the...

European sovereign bond trading occurs in a highly liquid inter-dealer market and a parallel dealer-customer market in which buy-side financial institutions request quotes from primary dealers. Synchronized price data from both market segments allow us to compare market quality. We find that...

We examine evidence for a systematic underperformance of Germany's state-owned banks in the current financial crisis and study if the bank losses can be traced to the quality of bank governance. For this purpose, we examine the biographical background of 593 supervisory board members in the 29...