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...

In the past few years, corporate governance has become a popular area of discussionin continental Europe. Having been a topic of academic research for a longtime in the Anglo-Saxon literature, corporate governance has only recently movedfrom a special interest into all sections of the corporate...

Earnings announcement event returns are significantly positive (negative) for loser(winner) stocks. Postevent drift is stronger for earnings surprises running counter totrends associated with stocks' classification as prior winners/losers or value/growth.These results are in accordance with...

Based on a new methodological framework we investigate IPO (under-)performance in asample of 7,378 firms going public in the 1975-2005 period. We explicitly vary the time horizonin our analysis and document a significant underperformance of IPO firms over the firstyear after going public, while...

This paper aims to survey selected recent papers presenting new evidenceon an age-old question in financial economics: “Are stock market returnspredictable?”. The hypothesis that equity returns are predictable (specificallyat long horizons) has been called a “new fact in finance” by...

We study the extremal dependence of market and liquidity risk, the former beingmeasured through the market return and the latter being measured throughthe relative bid-ask spread. We apply a non-parametrical approach to measurebivariate exceedance probabilities and the respective dependence...

It is well known that asset allocation policy is the major determinant of fundperformance. However, there is substantial disagreement about the exactmagnitude of the contribution of asset allocation. Following the approach inIbbotson and Kaplan (2000), we use German and Swiss balanced mutualfund...

In the absence of a broad international agreement, national climate policiesare less efficient, due to carbon leakage, and more costly, due to causingunemployment and a loss of competitiveness on international markets. As,in many countries, a substantial fraction of emissions results from the...

Based on the style analysis pioneered in [Sharpe, W.F. (1992). AssetAllocation: Management Style and Performance Measurement, Journalof Portfolio Management, 7-19.] I dene a procedure to examine theconsistency of hedge fund indexes across providers. The results of myinvestigation suggest that...

In this paper we analyzed the violations of UIP for the Swiss Franc against the Dollar, the Euro, the Yen, thePound and the Canadian Dollar using recent data up to fall 2008. This exercise provides the following mainresults : first the Swiss interest rate puzzle disappeared, i.e. mean returns on...