We argue that takeover protections decrease equity value and increase equity risk and stock returns by removing a valuable put option to sell equity when firms approach financial distress. We investigate these claims empirically by looking at the dynamics of equity prices, equity risk, and stock...

We document a curious feature of the German mutual fund industry. Unlike U.S. mutual funds, funds domiciled in Germany do not necessarily compute their net asset values (NAV) as of market close. Using a sample of German equity funds, we infer each fund's NAV closing time from the best-fit market...

Research on socially responsible investment in equity markets initially focused on sin stocks. Since then, the availability of data has been extended substantially and now covers environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. Using ESG scores of firms belonging to the MSCI World universe,...

This paper investigates whether news suggestive of irrationality within financial markets have an impact on stock returns. We construct a lexicon of words for 'market irrationality' and score daily news articles based on the number and proportion of words they contain from the lexicon. We find...

"We present a model in which some investors are prohibited from using leverage and other investors' leverage is limited by margin requirements. The former investors bid up high-beta assets while the latter agents trade to profit from this, but must de-lever when they hit their margin...

We develop and implement methods for determining whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for prospect investors. We formulate a new testing procedure for prospect spanning for two nested portfolio sets based on subsampling and...

We show that in recent years global factor models have been catching up significantly with their local counterparts in terms of explanatory power (R2) for international stock returns. This catch-up is driven by a rise in global factor betas, not a rise in factor volatilities, suggesting that the...

We show that in a consumption-based asset-pricing model with hyperbolic discounting leading to dynamically inconsistent time preferences value premium increases nonlin-early with the degree of discounting and thus affects cross section of returns. To test our model empirically, we relate the...