Freelancing human experts play an important role in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Expert ratings partially reflect the reciprocal network of ICO members and analysts. Ratings predict ICO success, but highly imperfectly so. Favorably rated ICOs tend to fail when more ratings reciprocate prior...

From the beginning of 2020, the whole world has been shaken by a contagious disease called Covid-19, its actual name being SARS-CoV-2. It first appeared in China, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in December 2019, and the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed about it on the 31st of December...

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...

Using an international sample of more than 65,000 rating actions by Fitch, Moody's and S&P, we analyze the effect of the Dodd-Frank Act on credit ratings. We document that (i) rating report content changes significantly after Dodd-Frank and (ii) show, by exploiting within firm-quarter variation,...

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...

This paper sheds new light on the impact of information risk and market stress on herding of institutional traders from both, a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Using numerical simulations of a herd model, we show that buy and sell herding intensity should increase with information...

This paper investigates short-term effects of big tech start-up acquisitions on innovation empirically. Innovation research has found a strong positive, causal relationship between VC investment and innovation. Using this insight, we can explore the repercussions of big tech start-up...

I show how irrational ideas and rumors can drive asset prices - not because anyone believes them, but because they are commonly known without being common knowledge. The phenomenon is driven by short-term market participants who are well-informed about the information that others have, and who...

The present study contributes to the ongoing debate on possible costs and benefits of insider trading. We present a novel call auction model with insider information. Our model predicts that more insider information improves informational efficiency of prices, but this comes at the expense of...

In this study, using a comprehensive dataset on business media coverage and textual analysis of the discussions in firms' quarterly earnings conference calls, we show that firms whose management fail to satisfy the demand for information, ceteris paribus, receive less media coverage. Poor...