This paper develops and tests a model of how country characteristics, such as legal protections for minority investors, and the level of economic and financial development, influence firms’ costs and benefits in implementing measures to improve their own governance and transparency. The model...

This paper investigates how a foreign firm’s decision to cross-list its shares in the U.S. is related to the concentration of the ownership of its cash flow rights and of its control rights. Theory has proposed that when private benefits are high, controlling shareholders are less likely to...

During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in IPO activity around the world. Though vibrant IPO activity, attributed to better institutions and governance, used to be a strength of the U.S., it no longer is. IPO activity in the U.S. has fallen compared to the rest of the world...

This paper investigates Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) deregistrations by foreign firms from the time the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was passed in 2002 through 2008. We test two theories, the bonding theory and the loss of competitiveness theory, to understand why foreign firms leave...

On March 21, 2007, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted Exchange Act Rule 12h-6 which makes it easier for foreign private issuers to deregister and terminate the reporting obligations associated with a listing on a major U.S. exchange. We examine the characteristics of 59 firms...

This paper examines the stock price impact of terrorist attacks. Using an official list of terrorism related incidents compiled by the Counterterrorism Office of the U.S. Department of State, we identify 75 attacks between 1995 and 2002 in which publicly traded firms are targets. An event study...

This study seeks to identify which factors are important for explaining the time-series and cross-section variation in global stock returns. We evaluate firm characteristics, like size, earnings/price, cash flow/price, dividend/price, book-to-market equity, leverage, momentum, that have been...

This paper investigates the dynamic relation between returns and trading volume in international stock markets. We test the heterogeneous-agent, rational expectations model of Llorente, Michaely, Saar, and Wang (2002) for a comprehensive sample of 556 foreign stocks cross-listed on U.S. markets...

We introduce Indirect Robust Generalized Method of Moments (IRGMM), a new simulation-based estimation methodology, to model short-term interest rate processes. The primary advantage of IRGMM relative to classical estimators of the continuous-time short-rate diffusion processes is that it...

Over the past forty years, financial markets throughout the world have steadily become more open to foreign investors. With open markets, asset prices are determined globally. A vast literature on portfolio choice and asset pricing has evolved to study the importance of global factors as well as...