The end of the lockup period of initial public offerings generally constitutes the first time corporateinsiders sell significant numbers of shares on the market. I test the hypothesis that shareholderspressure analysts to support the share price until the end of the lockup period.[...]

Does legal insider trading contribute to market efficiency? Using the refinementproposed by the recent microstructure literature, we analyze the information contentof legal insider trading. Our sample encompasses 2,110 different companies subject to59,244 aggregated daily insider trades over the...

This paper develops a signalling game in which the decision to raise public equityis a real option of the …rm. Firms may use multiple signals to reveal their type:the timing of the IPO, the fraction of shares issued and the underpricing of shares.The model provides a tractable approach for...

We find that price and earnings momentum are pervasive features of international equitymarkets when controlling for data snooping biases. For European countries, we find that pricemomentum is subsumed by earnings momentum on an aggregate level. However, this rationaledoes not apply to each and...

We find that stocks exhibiting high dispersion in analysts’ earnings forecasts do not onlyunderperform in the U.S. but also in many European countries. Testing for the dispersioneffect in many countries calls for adequate multiple testing controls and we show that theU.S. dispersion effect...

The pricing of closed-end funds in the United States has been a focus of debate aboutmarket efficiency. Institutional ownership of closed-end fund shares in the UnitedKingdom is much greater than in the U.S., yet share prices display similar evidence ofnoise trading...

The most relevant practical impediment to an application of the Markowitz portfolio selectionapproach is the problem of estimating return moments, in particular return expectations. We analyzethe consequences of using return estimates implied by analysts’ dividend forecasts under the...

In the literature, implied rates of return are suggested as estimators for future expected oneperiodreturns because of their property not being prone to the discount rate effect. The discount rateeffect describes the problem that changes in expected future one-period returns lead to...

A growing literature is using stock return synchronicity, or the R2 from a market model regression,as an inverse measure of the extent to which firm-specific information is reflected in stock prices. Inthis paper, we argue that the relationship between R2 and the informativeness of stock prices...

We investigate determinants of launch spreads in European securitizationtransactions over the last decade. First, we develop a simple, reduced-form pricingmodel for all issues across different transaction types and test it. We document thecritical importance of credit ratings without refinements...