We analyze how investment into the pipeline system supplying Russian natural gas to WesternEurope is distorted for strategic reasons. We use a two stage multilateral bargaining game amongheterogenous players, some lacking the ability to make long-term commitments. At the first stagethe players...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held firms, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed firms. We provide an explanation for the use of put and call options, tag-along rights, drag-along rights, demand rights, piggy-back rights, and catch-up...

With its standards FAS 141 and 142 the Financial Accounting Standard Board has revo-lutionized the accounting for business combinations. One of the major changes is theabolishment of goodwill-amortization, which has been replaced by an annual impairmenttest at the level of a reporting unit....

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing the role of financial factors as a source of instability in small open economies. Our basic model is a dynamic open economy model with a tradeable good produced with capital and a country-specific factor. We also assume that firms face credit...

We study the dispersion of month-end valuations placed on identical corporatebonds by different mutual funds. Such dispersion is related to bond-specificcharacteristics associated with liquidity and market volatility. TRACE may havecontributed to the general decline in dispersion over our sample...

We examine the role of hedge funds as primary lenders to corporate firms. We investigate boththe reasons and the implications of hedge funds’ activities in the primary loan market. Weexamine the characteristics of firms that borrow from hedge funds and find that borrowers areprimarily firms...

We analyze the quality of macroeconomic survey forecasts. Recent findings indicate that theyare anchoring biased. This irrationality would challenge the results of a wide range ofempirical studies, e.g., in asset pricing, volatility clustering or market liquidity, which rely onsurvey data to...

Analysts providing more accurate earnings forecasts also issue moreprofitable recommendations. We demonstrate how investors can profit fromthis contemporaneous link by differentiating between “able” and “lucky”analysts. In line with previous studies, we find that past track records...

We present evidence of the impact of buy-side analysts on the behavior and performanceof fund managers. Using data provided by a large global asset manager,we relate buy-side analysts’ recommendations to fund transactions on a daily basis.Our results show that buy-side analysts have a...