The question of how an individual firm's social and environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decrease its market risk or is environmental performance just a...

This study examines the relationship between corporate social performance and stock returns in the UK. Using a set of disaggregated social performance indicators for environment, employment and community activities, we are able to more closely evaluate the interactions between social and...

This study considers the stock performance of America's 100 Best Corporate Citizens following the annual survey by Business Ethics. We examine both possible short-term announcement effects around the time of the survey's publication, and whether longer-term returns are higher for firms that are...

This paper examines the relationship between a firm's reputation and the returns on its shares. We employ a unique dataset from the UK based on ten years of surveys conducted for Management Today, where company directors and analysts at leading investment firms are asked to rate each company in...

Economic theory suggests production complementarity is an important driver of sectoral co-movements and business cycle fluctuations. We operationalize this concept by developing a measure of the production complementarity distance (COMPL) between any two companies. We find firms from different...

This paper employs a unique dataset from the UK based on ten years of surveys of company directors and analysts conducted for Management Today to examine the relationship between a firm’s reputation and the returns on its shares. We find that investors who purchase stocks with reputation...

Regulations impose idiosyncratic capital and funding costs for holding derivatives. Capital requirements are costly because derivatives desks are risky businesses; funding is costly in part because regulations increase the minimum funding tenor. Idiosyncratic costs mean no single measure makes...

The present value discount rate (PVDR) is the expected rate of return on the best alternative asset (BAA) the investor forgoes when purchasing an asset. How do we calculate it in the competitive market context? The Discounted Future Income Model projects an asset’s annual future income or...

We investigate and test hypotheses on how informed trading varies with market-wide factors and the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We find strong evidence of commonality in informed trading, and a systematic dependence of informed trading on firm characteristics that is largely...

This dissertation is built around three separate papers that research several aspects of stock market liquidity. All three papers use the innovative XLM (Exchange Liquidity Measure) data to measure the liquidity. The first paper entitled Does Screen Trading Weather the Weather? A Note on Cloudy...