Regulatory and media concern has focused heavily on the potentially manipulative distortion of market prices associated with naked short selling. However, naked shorting can also have beneficial effects for liquidity and pricing efficiency. We empirically investigate the impact of naked...

This paper investigates politically connected firms in Germany. With the introduction of a new transparency law in 2007, information on additional income sources for all members of the German parliament became publicly available. We find that members of the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the...

Utilizing subsets of trades in which dealers act purely as agents, purely as market-makers, and as both, we decompose dealer spreads in U.S. corporate bond OTC markets into components arising from: 1) dealers' marketmaking role, and 2) their role as agents for their non-dealer customers. We find...

With the controversial decision in the "Frosta" case, Germany's Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) has made significant changes to the rules that apply to corporate delistings from German stock exchanges. The mandatory approval of the delisting by shareholders and the minority...

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...

Recent empirical research suggests that measures of investor sentiment have predictive power for future stock returns over the intermediate and long term. Given the widespread publication of sentiment indicators, smart investors should trade on the information conveyed by such indicators and...

Value premium has been well documented in the finance literature. This paper empirically examines whether the value strategy of buying value stocks and selling growth stocks is profitable after controlling for transaction costs. Using the limited dependent variable estimate of transaction costs...