Credit rating changes for long-term foreign currency debt may act as a wake-up call with up-grades and downgrades in one country affecting other financial markets within and across national borders. Such a potential (contagious) rating effect is likely to be stronger in emerging market...

After nearly two decades of U.S. leadership in the 1980s and 1990s, are Europe’s venture capital markets in the 2000s finally catching up regarding the provision of financing and successful exits, or is the performance gap as wide as ever? Are we amidst overall dismal performance of the...

With currently more than 17,000 mutual funds available, many investors are looking for tools to identify the best performing mutual funds. The most well-known fund rating system is provided by Morningstar Inc. This study investigates in a thorough empirical analysis the predictive performance of...

This paper deals with the proposed use of sovereign credit ratings in the "Basel Accord on Capital Adequacy" (Basel II) and considers its potential effect on emerging markets financing. It investigates in a first attempt the consequences of the planned revisions on the two central aspects of...

Major corporations often respond charitably to humanitarian needs in times of disaster. However, disasters can also be negative events that impose non-trivial costs on firms, and under adverse conditions, firms typically donate less, not more. This paper takes a strategic perspective on...

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains affect the prices of cash flow versus discount rate risk. We construct a return decomposition distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas in up and down markets. Using U.S. data we find that downside cash flow and discount...

This study analyzes the short-term dynamic spillovers between the futures returns on the DAX, the DJ Eurostoxx 50 and the FTSE 100. It also examines whether economic news is one source of international stock return co-movements. In particular, we test whether stock market interdependencies are...

We estimate the risk and expected returns of private equity investments based on the market prices of exchange-traded funds of funds that invest in unlisted private equity funds. Our results indicate that the market expects unlisted private equity funds to earn abnormal returns of approximately...