Corporate governance literature advances the idea that certain aspects of board of directors' structure improve monitoring of managerial decisions. Among these is the managers' decision to manage earnings. Prior studies have shown that earnings management, in widely-held public companies, is...

This study examines the predictive power of comprehensive income and its individual components within the homogenous institutional setting of German IFRS firms. The results could be relevant for the standard setters IASB and FASB and their joint project “Financial Statement Presentation”. We...

We provide evidence that an option implied volatility-based measure predicts future absolute excess returns of the underlying stock around earnings announcements and annual meetings of shareholders, even after controlling for the realized stock return volatility shortly before these information...

Under semi-strong market efficiency future returns are unpredictable from previously released information. We test the degree of semi-strong form market efficiency in the credit default swap (CDS) market by examining the relationship between subsequent CDS returns and previously announced...

We use a dataset of sell-side analysts' scenario-based valuation estimates to examine whether analysts reliably assess the risk surrounding a firm's fundamental value. We find that the spread in analysts' state-contingent valuations captures the riskiness of operations and predicts the absolute...

In this paper we will be estimating risk-neutral densities (RND) for the largest euro area stock market (the index of which is the German DAX), reporting their statistical properties, and evaluating their forecasting performance. We have applied an innovative test procedure to a new, rich, and...

This paper studies the information content of the S&P 500 and VIX markets on the volatility of the S&P 500 returns. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. An extensive model specification analysis reveals that...

This paper decomposes the risk premia of individual stocks into contributions from systematic and idiosyncratic risks. I introduce an affine jump-diffusion model, which accounts for both the factor structure of asset returns and that of the variance of idiosyncratic returns. The estimation is...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

Supported by empirical examples, this paper provides a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set for the estimation of the empirical pricing kernel and, more in general, for the validity of the fundamental theorems of asset pricing. While inferring the...