On theoretical grounds, monitoring of top executives by the (supervisory) board is expected to be value relevant. The empirical evidence is ambiguous and we analyze three non-competing explanations for this ambiguity: (i) The positive effect on firm value of board monitoring is hidden in stock...

On theoretical grounds, monitoring of top executives by the (supervisory) board is expected to be value relevant. The empirical evidence is ambiguous and we analyze three non-competing explanations for this ambiguity: (i) The positive effect on firm value of board monitoring is hidden in stock...

Discount rates affect stock prices directly via the discount-rate channel or indirectly via the cash-flow channel because expected future cash-flow growth varies with the discount rates. The traditional Macaulay duration captures the effect from the discount-rate channel. I propose a novel...

This paper documents a significantly negative cross-sectional relation between left-tail risk and future returns on individual stocks trading in the U.S. and international countries. We provide a behavioral explanation to this anomaly based on the idea that investors underestimate the...

We find that a small set of financial columnists has a causal effect on short-term aggregate stock market prices. For some journalists ("bulls") the market reaction is consistently positive, whereas for others ("bears") it is negative. Because bulls and bears are rotated exogenously in our...