Several commentators, most notably Harvard law professor Lucian Bebchuk, have called for greater shareholder control over public firms. Yet an extensive academic literature suggests that shareholders enjoy net benefits from board governance. Why, then, do so many observers believe shareholders...

Mutual funds are an important vehicle for low- and middle-income households to invest in the stock market and save for the future. The number of families investing in mutual funds has increased more than 1,000 percent, from 4.6 million households investing in mutual funds in 1980, to a high of...

One can consider the concept of market neutrality as having quot;breadthquot; and quot;depthquot;: quot;Breadthquot; reflects the number of market risks to which the hedge fund is neutral, while quot;depthquot; reflects the quot;completenessquot; of the neutrality of the fund to market risks. We...

We examine the magnitude and the cross-sectional determinants of the adverse selection component of the spread for a sample of 266 closed-end funds traded on the New York Stock Exchange. We find no evidence that the adverse selection component of the spread for closed-end funds is related to...

This study employs a recent national survey of over 1100 British financial firms to ascertain the determinants of financial innovation and their sales success using Logit and generalised Tobit models. We find the likelihood of financial innovation rises with the size of financial firms, employee...

We compare institutional execution costs across the major U.S. exchanges using a sample of institutional equity orders in firms that switch exchanges. Execution costs including commissions are essentially indistinguishable across these exchanges. We also find the fraction of trading volume from...

In June 1997, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) lowered its minimum price increment on most stocks from eighths to sixteenths. Like other researchers investigating similar events, we find that quoted spreads and effective spreads decline with the introduction of sixteenths. However, spreads do...

This paper presents a new method for improving the performance of trend-following trading strategies. This new approach improves the inherent problem of trend-following strategies, which is their lagging signals. We simulate alternative price paths of financial assets using a modification of a...

The purpose of this study is to examine the tracking ability of physical (in-kind) and synthetic (swap-based) Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). By using three different measures of tracking error, I examine ten pairs of ETFs, which on aggregate track different asset classes (equities, bonds,...

The sixth annual World Pensions Forum was held on 23-24 February 2017 at the Queen's House in the Royal Borough of Greenwich.Over 120 representatives attended: from pension and sovereign funds, central banks and government agencies including financial regulators. Topics discussed included...