Covers -- Editorial advisory board -- Guest editorial -- Advances in the corporate finance literature: a survey of recent studies on Korea -- Publisher note -- The cost of debt and the characteristics of audit firms -- The more connected, the better? Impact of connectedness on volatility and...

We examine the capital structure policies of Korean firms using survey data for business group (chaebol) firms and independent firms. Our results are compared with the findings in the earlier studies for developed economies: Graham and Harvey (2001) for the U.S. and Brounen, De Jong, and Koedijk...

Most of the previous research in the asymmetric information problem treats adverse selection and moral hazard separately, though they may coexist and interact with each other. We build a principal-agent model to examine optimal contracts in a competitive insurance market facing adverse selection...

Financial crises inflict significant human as well as economic hardship. This paper focuses on the human fallout of capital market stress. Financial stress-induced behavioral changes can manifest in higher suicide and murder-suicide rates. We find that these rates also correlate with the Gross...

This article documents significant dispersion in the beta estimates of exchange-traded funds as available on some leading financial websites. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first systematic study of the dispersion of betas as seen on major finance websites. Almost 40 million...

We examine the sentiment levels of individual investors relative to subsequent short-term market returns for 1992-2010. We find that sentiment, proxied by percentage of investors who are “bullish” on the market, is significantly negatively related to the subsequent three- and six-month...

The Value Line Investment Survey, with its well-known timeliness and safety rankings, has managed to generate a superior performance record over time. The authors' findings show that Value Line's timeliness ranks were significant predictors of success during our study period, even when several...

While the sell-in-May effect appears to persist in the long run, the authors find that the anomaly is not present in non-election years (both mid-term and presidential elections). There is no significant difference between the May–October and November–April stock returns in non-election...

In this paper, the marginal effects of changes (due to non-stationarity or estimation errors) in the REIT-stock risk premium and the REIT-stock correlation on the optimal portfolio asset mix of REITs, stocks, and bonds are determined. Employing a mean variance utility function and considering...