BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are viewed currently as pillars of relative political, economic and financial stability, with the prospect of a major shift in future world power. The paper aims at investigating the relationships among the economic, financial and political...

Using a large sample of firms listed on the Korea Stock Exchange over the 1992-2002 period, this paper investigates a hitherto unexplored question of whether and how trading by foreign and domestic institutional investors improves the extent to which firm-specific information is incorporated...

Does a catastrophe bond issue increase the insurance firm value to shareholders? By issuing such bonds, insurance companies that are exposed to weather claims, can share their risk with investors, managing the corporate risk. The academic literature argues that hedging activities can increase a...

Managerial, or discretionary, earnings opacity is the intentional lack of transparency to hide the intrinsic value of a firm. Opacity arises through two channels. The first is ex ante, when managers manipulate current expectations about future performance; and the second is ex post, when managers...

Insurance securitization has long been hailed as an important tool to increase the underwriting capacity for companies exposed to catastrophe-related risks. However, global volumes of insurance securitization have remained surprisingly low to date which raises questions over its benefits. In...

It is well known that the market-to-book equity ratio and total asset growth are negatively associated with future stock returns. Much less known is that the predictabilities are related through the mispricing channel. We show that the growth-value anomaly is governed by ex-ante total asset...

This research considers the strategies on the initial public offering of company equity at the stock exchanges in the imperfect highly volatile global capital markets with the nonlinearities. We provide the IPO definition and compare the initial listing requirements on the various markets. We...

It is well known that the market-to-book equity ratio and total asset growth are negatively associated with future stock returns. Much less known is that the predictabilities are related through the mispricing channel. We show that the growth-value anomaly is governed by ex-ante total asset...

We study mechanisms whereby stock market valuations may color corporate investment by using European firm-level data. We find that managers vicariously learn from stock prices when making investment decisions. Specifically, managers' propensity to learn increases in stock price informativeness....