We analyze governance with a new dataset on investments of venture capitalists in 3848 portfolio firms in 39 countries from North and South America, Europe and Asia spanning 1971-2003. We provide evidence that cross-country differences in legality, including legal origin and accounting...

This paper investigates the market timing abilities of private equity fund managers using a unique set of detailed cash-flow data. We show that investment timing has an impact on the performance of venture capital funds. Surprisingly, divestment timing has no such impact on returns. For...

The paper explores factors that influence the design of financing contracts between venture capital investors and European venture capital funds. 122 Private Placement Memoranda and 46 Partnership Agreements are investigated in respect to the use of covenant restrictions and compensation...

In this article, we investigate risk return characteristics and diversification benefits when private equity is used as a portfolio component. We use a unique dataset describing 642 US-American portfolio companies with 3620 private equity investments. Information about precisely dated cash flows...

We study the impact of noise traders' limited attention on financial markets. We exploit episodes of sensational news (exogenous to the market) that distract noise traders. On “distraction days”, trading activity, liquidity, and volatility decrease, and prices reverse less among stocks owned...

We investigate how distraction affects the trading behavior of professional asset managers. Exploring detailed transaction‐level data, we show that managers with a large fraction of portfolio stocks exhibiting an earnings announcement are significantly less likely to trade in other stocks,...

We study the extent of cross-asset learning in financial markets by examining spillover effects around mutual fund fire sales. We find that the well-documented impact-reversal pattern for the returns of fire sale stocks (e.g., Coval and Stafford, 2007) spills over onto the stock returns of...

We analyze the three main exit routes for exiting buyout investments, initial public offerings (IPO), sales and write-offs on, using a unique data set for US and European buyout transactions for the 1990 to 2005 period. We examine the determinants influencing the choice of an exit channel...

Even today, contractual saving for housing (CSH) through building societies (\textit{Bausparkassen}) is one of the major sources for housing financing in several countries in Continental Europe. The origins of CSH can be traced back to 1920s Germany. In this time, a weak and financially...

Capital requirements are key elements in banking regulation. As the failure of a systemically important institution poses a risk to the whole economy, they have to meet special regulations. Our research uses a unique data set to show the influence of economic factors on the capital buffer...