Short sellers are perceived as informed, sophisticated investors. Yet little is known about their actual performance and trading strategies. Using a novel, hand-collected data set of daily position disclosures in Europe, we identify the entry, change, and exit dates of large short-sale positions...

This study documents economically meaningful and persistent financial advisor fixed effects in target firms’ abnormal stock returns shortly prior to takeover announcements.Additional difference-in-differences analyses suggest that advisors are associated with lower pre-bid stock returns after...

This paper presents the most extensive analysis of liquidity in the German equity market so far. We examine the evolution of liquidity over time, the determinants of liquidity, and commonality across liquidity measures and countries. We make use of a new publicly available dataset, the Market...

This paper serves two purposes. First, we introduce a new data set on the German stock market which is publicly available to all researchers. It comprises factor returns (a market factor, a size factor, a book-to-market factor, and a momentum factor) as well as returns of portfolios which are...

This paper investigates whether measuring consumption risk over long horizons can improve the empirical performance of the Consumption CAPM for size and value premia in international stock markets (US, UK, and Germany). In order to account for commonalities in size and book-tomarket sorted...

In this paper, we develop characteristic-based asset-pricing models for international stocks. We price stocks using passive portfolios created based on observable characteristics: market capitalization, book-to-market, prior-year return, growth of total assets, and operating profitability, each...

We investigate and test hypotheses on how informed trading varies with market-wide factors and the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We find strong evidence of commonality in informed trading, and a systematic dependence of informed trading on firm characteristics that is largely...

We analyze trading opportunities that arise from differences between the bond and the CDS market. By simultaneously entering a position in a CDS contract and the underlying bond, traders can build a default-risk free position that allows them to repeatedly earn the difference between the bond...

This paper investigates whether investor sentiment can explain stock returns on the German stock market. Based on a principal component analysis, we construct a sentiment indicator that condenses information of several well-known sentiment proxies. We show that this indicator explains the return...

The paper explores whether the co-movement of market returns and equity fund flows can be explained by a common response to macroeconomic news. I find that variables that predict the real economy as well as the equity premium are related to mutual fund flows. Changes in dividend-price ratio...