It is often argued that Black-Scholes (1973) values overstate the subjective value of stock options granted to risk-averse and under-diversified executives. We construct a "representative" Swiss executive and extend the certainty-equivalence approach presented by Hall and Murphy (2002) to assess...

Using a panel of 425 European firms over the period from 1990 to 2005, we revisit Welch's (2004) finding that stock returns are the primary determinant of capital structure changes and that the corporate motives for issuing activities remain largely unexplained. We document that about half of...

We investigate the performance of a sample of German mutual equity funds overthe period from 1994 to 2003. Our general finding is that mutual funds, on average,hardly produce excess returns relative to their benchmark that are large enough tocover their expenses. This conclusion is drawn from a...

This paper investigates the impact of individual bank fundamental variables onstock market returns using data from a panel of 235 European banks from 1991to 2005. The sample period marks a significant transition in the European bankingsector, characterized by higher competition, lower profit...

In a series of papers in the 1970s, Camilo Dagum proposed several variants ofa new model for the size distribution of personal income. This Chapter traces thegenesis of the Dagum distributions in applied economics and points out paralleldevelopments in several branches of the applied statistics...

This paper surveys selected applications of the Lorenz curve and related stochasticorders in economics and econometrics, with a bias towards problems in statisticaldistribution theory. These include characterizations of income distributions in termsof families of inequality measures, Lorenz...