We examine the relation between the quality of corporate governance and the value of excess cash for large European firms (FTSEurofirst 300 Index). We use Deminor ratings for Shareholder rights, Takeover defences, Disclosure and Board as proxies for the quality of corporate governance. We find...

Despite a vast literature on the capital structure of the firm there still is a big gap between theory and practice. Starting with the seminal work by Modigliani & Miller, much attention has been paid to the optimality of capital structure from the shareholders’ point of view. Over the last...

This paper shows that stock market contagion operates through a domino effect, where small crashes evolve into more severe crashes. Using a novel unifying framework we model the occurrence of local, regional and global crashes in terms of past occurrences of these different crashes and financial...

We measure the economic value of information derived from macroeconomic variables and from technical trading rules for emerging markets currency investments. Our analysis is based on a sample of 21 emerging markets with a floating exchange rate regime over the period 1997-2007 and explicitly...

The dependence between asset returns varies. Its strength can become stronger or weaker. Also, its structure can change, for example, when asymmetries related to bull and bear markets become more or less pronounced. To analyze these different types of variations, we develop a model that...

Over the last decade, the going private market has experienced a considerable boom in size and also has become more interesting for private equity investors that are looking to partner with incumbent management. This offers managers the choice to take the firm private themselves in a traditional...

The state of the equity market, often referred to as a bull or a bear market, is of key importance for financial decisions and economic analyses. Its latent nature has led to several methods to identify past and current states of the market and forecast future states. These methods encompass...

We introduce a heuristic bias-adjustment for the transaction price-based realized range estimator of daily volatility in the presence of bid-ask bounce and non-trading. The adjustment is an extension of the estimator proposed in Christensen et al. (2009). We relax the assumption that all...

News plays a crucial role in determining prices in financial markets. In an efficient market, current prices fully and correctly reflect all available information, such that only truly new information leads to price adjustment. This lecture shows that using high-frequency data makes it possible...

We introduce a Mixed-Frequency Factor Model (MFFM) to estimate vast dimensional covari- ance matrices of asset returns. The MFFM uses high-frequency (intraday) data to estimate factor (co)variances and idiosyncratic risk and low-frequency (daily) data to estimate the factor loadings. We propose...