To determine whether negative shocks to specialized human capital are priced in the cross section of stock returns, this study measures shocks to industry-specific human capital by employment growth in that industry. In industries in which employment contracts, exposure to the value factor is...

We develop a model of rational bubbles, based on the assumptions of an unknown potential market size and delegation of investment decisions. In a bubble, the price of an asset rises above its steady-state value, which must be justified by rational expectations about possible future price...

Growing urbanization, increasing population and increased per capita income have boosted the demand for housing in India. This empirical study gives us an explanation of how the market leverage of the real state firms in India are affected by firm specific attributes and external market or...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a convincing approach towards resolving prominent asset pricing puzzles. Whilst the simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensations for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. While convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

In this paper, we explore the institutional investors' assessment of relative creditworthiness across selected country groups with a special focus on the impact of public debt on the perception of sovereign risk. Our results show that general government debt is among the most important...

Traditional business models of credit rating agencies (CRAs) are criticized for creating incentives for misreporting. This paper investigates a potential alternative in which CRAs receive revenue from advertisement only. We use a two-period Bayesian reputation model and show that CRAs will shirk...

The existing literature on cluster embeddedness largely neglects the impact of finance on the development of firm?s network linkages. This is striking in so far that particularly venture capital is often referred to as ?smart money? providing firms not only with funds but also with network...

This study analyzes the trading activity of institutional investors on German Stock Exchanges to evaluate herding behavior and its determinants. The paper uses a unique and superior high-frequent investor-level database that directly identifies every transaction of banks and financial service...

Using fund-, firm- and bank-level data we investigate the investments of private equity (PE) funds in the north-western regions of Italy. Both the private equity fund managers and the PE investments are heavily concentrated in this most developed area of the country. The average size of the...