Shareholder proposals are increasingly important tools for corporate reformers, yet courts, policy makers, and scholars are concerned that proposals may be used "opportunistically" as bargaining chips by activists to extract side payments from management. This paper investigates whether labor...

We study the impact of accelerated vesting of equity awards on takeovers, whereby the restricted stock and/or stock options of the target CEO immediately vest and become unrestricted upon the close of the acquisition. We find that takeover premiums are significantly larger when the target CEO...

This paper questions traditional approaches for testing the day-of-the-week effect on stock returns. We propose an alternative approach based on the closure test principle introduced by Marcus, Peritz and Gabriel (1976), which has become very popular in Biometrics and Medical Statistics. We test...

This paper provides a discussion of stamp duty and its effects. This is followed by an empirical study using changes in the rate of stamp duty in the UK as natural experiments. Because shares will be affected differently depending on how frequently they are traded, we can employ a...

Corporate sports sponsorship is an important part of many companies' corporate communication strategy. We take the example of major football tournaments to show that sponsorship indeed affects the sponsor's (stock) market value. We find a statistically significant impact of football results (at...

Based on criteria of mathematical simplicity and consistency with empirical market data, a stochastic volatility model is constructed, the volatility process being driven by fractional noise. Price return statistics and asymptotic behavior are derived from the model and compared with data....

The flow of information between futures and spot prices may vary over time, in particular during periods of stress. This article analyses the information content of the Bund Future and German government bonds during 1998 and test whether it is constant over time. The use of high-frequency data...

In recent years, a number of papers have established a new empirical regularity. Stocks of distressed firms vastly underperform those of financially healthy firms. It is not necessary to attribute the negative excess returns of distressed firms to inefficient or irrational markets. We show that...

Using monthly data for the period 1953-2003, we apply a real-time modeling approach to investigate the implications of U.S. political stock market anomalies for forecasting excess stock returns. Our empirical findings show that political variables, selected on the basis of widely used model...

This paper investigates the relationship between market reaction to earnings surprises and institutional concentration in the firm's shareholders base. We use data from the Polish stock market where pension funds form a homogenous and highly competitive investor class with an increasing share in...