Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

Current discussions about public and private pension plans often state that the stock market is less risky in the long run than in the short run. Pension plans with their rather long planning horizon are therefore asked to increase the allocation to the stock market. Such statements, however,...

This paper examines the characteristics of firms that voluntarily provide interim financial reports. Based on a sample of Swiss companies, where semi-annual reports became mandatory in 1997, I document that before interim reports became mandatory, analyst coverage, i.e. analysts’ demand for...

This paper formally proves that Rigobon and Sack (2004)'s approach of identifying monetary policy shocks through heteroscedasticity can be extended to a multimarket and multicountry framework. Applying our multivariate framework allows deriving consistent estimators of monetary policy effects....