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...

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...

Stock returns in emerging markets are to some extent predictable onthe basis of proper instrument variables. We show that local informationis more important than global information to capture emergingstock market returns. This is an indication for at least partial segmentationof emerging stock...

We analyze the asset allocation decisions of different investor groups and investigate how their investmentbehavior changes with macroeconomic conditions. Using a new data set that includes themonthly portfolio holdings of private, commercial, and institutional investors deposited with...

We investigate the performance of a sample of German mutual equity funds over the period from 1994 to 2003. Our general finding is that mutual funds, on average, hardly produce excess returns relative to their benchmark that are large enough to cover their expenses. This conclusion is drawn from...