Recent empirical work shows that a better legal environment leads to lowerexpected rates of return in an international cross-section of countries. Thispaper investigates whether differences in firm-specific corporate governancealso help to explain expected returns in a cross-section of firms...

We examine the underpricing and long-term performance of a broad set ofSwiss IPOs from 1983 to 2000. The average market adjusted initial return is34.97%. Our results support the ex ante uncertainty hypothesis, the signal-ling hypothesis and, to some extent, the market cyclicality hypothesis...

Die aktuelle Corporate Governance Literatur stützt die verbreitete Hypothe-se, dass sicht „gute“ Corporate Governance durch eine höhere Unterneh-mensbewertung manifestiert. Die Mehrzahl der empirischen Studien unter-sucht jedoch nur ausgewählte Corporate Governance Mechanismen...

Using a comprehensive set of listed Swiss companies, our findings suggestthat the size of the board of directors is an independent control mechanism.However, in contrast to previous studies, we do not find a significant rela-tionship between board size and firm performance. This suggests that...

We test leverage predictions of the trade-off and pecking order models using Swiss data. At an aggregate level, leverage of Swiss firms is comparatively low, but the results depend crucially on the exact definition of leverage. Confirming the pecking order model but contradicting the trade-off...

The goal of this paper is to assess, for the first time, the empirical impact of "Kaynes' beauty contest", or "higher order belief", on asset price volatility. The paper shows that heterogeneous expectations induce higher order beliefs and that heterogeneous expectation asset pricing models...

We consider a two-sided buyers & sellers' market with indiviseble goods. Agents may trade many units of any of the items available. Previous research, documenting the case ofunit-flow trades, showed that the existence of substitutability or complementarity colligations between goods. These...

These research addressess whether geographic diserfication provides benefits over industry diversification in a sample of European country and industry indexes.The methodology allows performance comparison with short-slling constraints, upper and lower bounds, and many bechmarks. In the absence...