The folk wisdom is that competition reduces agency costs. We provide indirect empirical support for this view. We argue that the temptation to retain cash and engage in less productive activities is more severe for firms in less competitive industries. Hence an unanticipated increase in...

We show that a mutual fund's stock selection skill can be decomposed into additional components that include impatient quot;informed tradingquot; and quot;liquidity provision.quot; We validate our method by verifying that liquidity providing trades are the primary source of value for the...

This is Appendix D of the paper 'Why Do IPO Auctions Fail?' It contains information on IPO methods for 44 countries, including more details regarding our sources. We contacted stock exchanges and financial market regulators around the world, and also gathered information from academic sources...

We document a somewhat surprising regularity: of the many countries that have used IPO auctions, virtually all have abandoned them. The common explanations given for the lack of popularity of the auction method in the US, viz., issuer reluctance to try a new experimental method, and underwriter...

When consumption betas of stocks are computed using year-over-year consumption growth based upon the fourth quarter, the CCAPM explains the cross-section of stock returns as well as the Fama and French (1993) three-factor model. The CCAPM's performance deteriorates substantially when consumption...

When consumption betas of stocks are computed using consumption growth from 4th quarter of one year to the next, the CCAPM explains the cross section of stock returns as well as the Fama and French (1993) three factor model. The CCAPM performance deteriorates substantially when consumption...

We show that the in-sample estimate of the variance of a global minimum risk portfolio constructed using an estimated covariance matrix of returns will on average be strictly smaller than its true variance. Scaling the in-sample estimate upward by a standard degrees-of-freedom related factor or...