We study the relations between compensation schemes and risk aversion of managers in a strategic framework. We first show that the use of relative performance evaluation (RPE) in compensation contracts reduces the equilibrium profits of Cournot firms if managers are not too risk averse. Second,...

This paper belongs to the growing body of the ?Law and finance) literature based on timeseries study. It carries out an empirical investigation of the role of corporate governance in financial development. We focus on French corporate governance reforms in order to examine whether these reforms...

This paper analyzes the structure of national corporate board networks of all listed firms in a very large cross-section of countries. Controlling for degree distribution, the hypothesis of randomly generated bipartite board director networks is very strongly rejected using a rigorous simulation...

Within a traditional context of myopic discrete-time mean-variance portfolio optimisation, the problem of conditioned optimisation, in which predictive information about returns contained in a signal is used to inform the choice of portfolio weights, was first expressed and solved in concrete...

In this paper we investigate the risk sharing potential of financial intermediaries in an overlapping generations economy. We find that the intermediaries allocations are constrained by the temptation of the living to liquidate their intermediary s assets and share the proceeds amongst...

This paper generalizes the existing asymptotic single-factor model to address issues related to industry heterogeneity, default clustering and capital requirement s parameter uncertainty in US retail loan portfolios. We argue that the Basel II capital requirement overstates the riskiness of...

We show that the annual excess return of the S&P 500 is almost 10 percent higher during the last two years of the presidential cycle than during the first two years. This pattern cannot be explained by business-cycle variables capturing timevarying risk premia, differences in risk levels, or by...

This paper investigates the effect of anticipated/experienced regret and pride on individual investors decisions to hold or sell a winning or losing investment, in the form of the disposition effect. As expected the results suggest that in the loss domain, low anticipated regret predicts a...

This paper highlights the impact of credit supply and aggregate demand sensitivity on 91 US industries stock performance during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. We account explicitly for changes in the market model and investigate, next to stock returns, the changes in systematic risk and...

This paper considers the effect on performance of very large controlling shareholders, who are mostly organized in voting blocks and business groups, in a sample of Belgian listed firms from 1991 to 2006. We use a non-parametric panel data analysis, which is a new technique that does not impose...