This study examines the impact of creditor rights on cash holdings using a sample of firms from 48 countries. We argue that creditor rights affect the willingness of lenders to provide credit, which in turn affects the need for internal liquidity and cash holdings. Consistent with this, we find...

Building on a unique panel data set of German Prime Standard companies for the period 2005-2008, this paper investigates the influencing factors of both director compensation levels and structure, i.e. the probability of performance-based compensation. Drawing on agency theory arguments and...

After the inception of the euro, the real economy in most member countries remained dependent on credit by domestic banks, which increasingly funded themselves through cross-border interbank funding. We find that this pattern of 'double-decker' banking integration exposed domestic banks to sharp...

Long-term interest rates in a number of small-open inflation targeting economies co-move more strongly with US long-term rates than with short-term rates in those economies. We augment a standard small open-economy model with imperfectly substitutable government bonds and time-varying term...

The U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) is expected to start raising policy interest rates in the near term and thus commence a tightening cycle for the first time in nearly a decade. The taper tantrum episode of May-June 2013 is a reminder that even a long anticipated change in Fed policies can trigger...

This study explores the determinants of corporate bond spreads in emerging markets economies. Using a largely unexploited dataset, the paper finds that corporate bond spreads are determined by firm-specific variables, bond characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, sovereign risk, and global...

This paper presents a rational expectations model of asset prices with rationally inattentive investors that, unlike previous papers, explains both the substantial amount of equity wealth invested domestically and the puzzling time series behavior of the home bias - an initial plateau before...

This empirical study analyzes market and currency risk premia during financial and political crises within the theoretical framework of the international asset pricing model of Adler and Dumas (1983). The econometric specification extends the multivariate GARCH approach of De Santis and Gerard...

According to the traditional view held in finance returns of assets are determined by complete rationality of decision makers. Rational decisions are defined by a set of axioms that are universal and do not leave room for cultural differences. In this article we show that cultural differences do...

We use an affine asset pricing model to jointly value stocks and bonds. This enables us to derive endogenous correlations and to explain how economic fundamentals influence the correlation between stock and bond returns. The presented model is implemented for G7 post-war economies and its...