Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...

We perform various experiments correlating past changes of social indicators about a country with future stock market returns for that country. The 169 social indicators we use, which go back as far as the year 1900, are available from the Varieties of Democracy Project. We use two sets of data...

This paper assesses the effect of political institutions on stock market performance in 14 African countries for which stock market data is available for the period 1990-2010. The estimation technique used is a Two-Stage-Least Squares Instrumental Variable methodology. Political regime channels...

This paper examines the relationship between the level of democratization and stock index returns in a sample of 74 countries. Compared with democracies, autocratic states are characterized by lower returns despite exhibiting higher return volatility. Even though this higher volatility can be...

The aim of this study was to determine whether referendums affect stock price risks and returns, using an event study approach. Daily end period data for the Swiss stock market index, the STOXX European market index, and the Swiss/US exchange rate running from the beginning of 2004 to June 2021,...