Empirical modeling of dividends has been dominated by Lintner (1956). However, Lintner's model suffers from the logical paradox that if companies have target payout ratios then in the steady state the companies will have reached those target payout ratios. Moreover as demon-strated by Bond and...

This paper compares rival sovereign default models that differ in how country-, region- and time-specific effects are treated. The quality of the models is gauged using inference-based criteria and the plausibility of estimates. An out-of-sample forecast evaluation framework is deployed based on...

Indicators of financial crisis generally do not have a good track record. This paper presents an early warning system for six countries in Asia, in which indicators do work. We distinguish three types of financial crises, currency crises, banking crises and debt crises, and extract four groups...

Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a proposition equating the nominal exchange rate to the ratio of the domestic to foreign price levels. This paper employs Bayesian panel data methods to test for PPP, in particular, the implied symmetry and proportionality conditions. Using a data set of all the...

This paper analyses the impact that firms' financial position has on investment decisions using panel data from a large sample of non-financial corporations (around 120,000 firms) in six euro area countries (Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain). The results indicate that...

Standard inference works poorly in models of the form y=gamma*g(beta,x) epsum, because the standard error for beta_hat depends on gamma_hat. In this paper we show that this problem is usefully studied by working with the linearization of g(.) and the resulting reduced form regression. Bias and...

The proposed research is intended to study the financing behavior of the Indian firms. The theory of capital structure is important for firms as they are constantly making investment decisions driven by financing decisions. Corporate decisions on capital structure policy have long been a subject...

Using a unique dataset of art auctions on eBay, we conduct an empirical analysis of the added value of an auction's charity status. The panel structure of our dataset allows us to employ fixed effects techniques to control for observed and unobserved differences across auctions. The existing...

We test for price discontinuities, or jumps, in a panel of high-frequency intraday returns for forty large-cap stocks and an equiweighted index from these same stocks. Jumps are naturally classified into two types: common and idiosyncratic. Common jumps affect all stocks, albeit to varying...

We propose a novel econometric model for estimating and forecasting cross-sections of time-varying conditional default probabilities. The model captures the systematic variation in corporate default counts across e.g. rating and industry groups by using dynamic factors from a large panel of...