Studies by LaPorta et al. (2000, 2002) show that the strong protection of investor rights encourage the development of capital markets and are associated with higher levels of firm valuation as measured by Tobin's Q. Related research finds that well-developed capital markets produce higher rates...

Myers and Majluf (1984) argue that informational asymmetry between managers and investors can explain the negative stock returns around the announcement of new equity. Using analyst following and consensus as proxies for information asymmetry, we observe that announcement period returns are...

This article examines the informational quality of implied volatility in forecasting future realized volatility using daily S&P 500 and S&P 100 index option prices from 2000 to 2006. In contrast to many previous studies, we find that implied volatility is an unbiased and efficient estimator of...

Our study examines the nature of industrial and global diversification for a sample of more than 12 000 firms across 35 emerging and developed countries during the period 1991-2006. Consistent with previous studies, we find that industrial diversification, either alone or combined with global...

This study examines how changes in block ownership effects firm value and performance for a sample of US firms over the period 1993-2001. We find that the creation of a new block has a significant impact on shareholder wealth while block elimination does not. The wealth effect is most pronounced...

In this paper we examine the length of political tenure in Canadian federally elected parliamentary governments since 1867. Using data on tenure length, we categorize the distribution of governing tenures in terms of a hazard function--the probability that an election will arise in each year,...

The paper addresses whether or not the exchange rate or some other dimension of the external side of the economy should form an integral part of the monetary rule for a small open economy (SOE) in which the central bank faces data deficiencies. Under a number of information scenarios, the...

Using a vector autoregressive (VAR) approach, the dynamic interactions and causal relationships among volatility, open interest, trading volume and arbitrage opportunities in the S&P 500 index futures market is examined. It is found that increased volatility lowers pricing error. This implies...