In this study, we examine international differences in firms' cost of equity capital around the world. Specifically, we investigate whether the effectiveness of labor protection regulations is systematically related to firms' cost of equity capital and how the presence of controlling...

This paper constructs a new measure of monetary policy shocks that is orthogonal to fundamentals by combining the high-frequency approach of Gurkaynak et al. (2005) and Romer and Romer (2004)'s narrative approach. The empirical features of the new measure are: (i) contractionary monetary policy...