We analyze how the adoption of the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), which limits buying or selling consumer data, heterogeneously affects firms with and without previously gathered data on consumers. Exploiting a novel and hand-collected data set of 11,436 conversational-AI firms with...

We study the shareholder value implications of a shift in the corporate balance of power towards shareholders. We find that in response to an unanticipated event that made it likely that an annual binding shareholder vote on management pay would become compulsory for Swiss public companies, the...

Directors are more likely to obtain additional directorships, especially at prestigious firms, if the CEOs of their current boards are well-connected. Recommended directors do not become beholden to the CEO, as CEO compensation is unaffected and an analysis of appointment announcement returns...

This paper provides a cross-country analysis to determine whether CEO turnover is a credible threat, whether it is effective in delivering performance improvements, and whether better governance improves credibility and effectiveness of CEO turnover. The analysis is based on a detailed panel of...

In this paper, I estimate the effect of mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions disclosure on corporate value. Using the introduction of mandatory GHG emissions reporting for firms listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange as a source of exogenous variation, I find that firms most...

Firms with credit-default swaps (CDS) traded on their debt may face "empty creditors'' as hedged creditors have less incentive to participate in firm restructuring. We test for the existence of empty creditors by employing an exogenous change to the bankruptcy code in Germany, that effectively...

This paper studies the earnings management behavior of a manager in a strategic game in which the manager may have incentives to avoid earnings below the analysts' consensus forecast and the analysts aiming to provide accurate forecasts behave as rational Bayesians. Our analysis reveals the...

Donald Trump's election and his nomination of Scott Pruitt, a climate skeptic, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency drastically downshifted expectations on US climate-change policy. We study firms' stock-price reactions and institutional investors' portfolio adjustments after these...

The Munich chain-ladder reserving method was introduced on an axiomatic basis. We analyze these axioms and we define a modified Munich chain-ladder reserving method which is based on an explicit stochastic model. This stochastic model then allows to consider claims prediction and prediction...

We give a rigorous definition of best-estimate reserves for insurance liabilities in a general multiperiod financial market setting. In this general multiperiod financial market setting we describe payoff spaces and optimal dynamic hedging strategies. Based on this optimal dynamic hedging...