We investigate the impact of universal banks on the performance and the risk of affiliated companies in an unregulated environment with booming financial markets. For a unique sample of 129 Belgian companies listed in the period 1905-1909, we find that universal bank affiliation had a positive...

Statistical population moments may be finite or infinite. Determining whether certain moments of a population are finite or not based on a finite sample turns out to be a very daunting and difficult task. If one assumes stock returns to behave according the sum stable law, characteristic...

This paper revisits some recently found evidence in the literature on the cross-section of stock returns for a carefully constructed dataset of euro area stocks. First, we find evidence of a negative cross-sectional relation between extreme positive returns and average returns after controlling...