What were the economic benefits and costs of preventing a stock market meltdown during the summer of 2015 by the Chinese government intervention? We answer this question by estimating the value creation for the stocks purchased by the government between the period starting with the market crash...

We examine the equity market reaction to events associated with the passage of a directive in the European Union (EU) mandating increased nonfinancial disclosure. These disclosures relate to firms' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance, and would be applicable to firms listed...

In this paper, we evaluate firm-, industry- and country-specific factors determining a firm's capital structure. The empirical validity of several capital structure theories has been ambiguous so far. We shed light on the main drivers of leverage and depict differences in industry and country...

The literature on short selling restrictions focuses mainly on a ban's impact on market efficiency, liquidity and overpricing. Surprisingly, little is known about the effects of short selling restrictions on institutional investors' trading behavior.Since institutional investors dominate mature...

The SEC decided in 2007 to allow foreign private issuers who use IFRS as promulgated by the IASB (pure IFRS filers, hereafter) to stop providing reconciliations to US GAAP. Some opposed the measure because the limited academic literature available at the time indicated that the reconciliation is...

This study analyzes the impacts of explicit transaction costs on weak-form market efficiency within the context of the brokerage commission deregulation in Japan in October 1999, which led to lower commission rates across the market. Applying two alternative statistical tests to both daily and...

This study examines the effect of transaction costs on the time series behavior of stock returns over a period surrounding the April 1989 changes in tax rates on securities transactions and capital gains in Japan. We find significant decreases in estimates of the first-order autocorrelation in...

We investigate the volatility impacts of the full commission deregulation in Japan in October 1999, and find that the deregulation overall tends to significantly increase price volatility in the Japanese equity market, using alternative model specifications and control variables. This finding...

The government support of financial firms through direct assistance and programs to improve market liquidity during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whether a given firm is ex-ante ‘Too Big To Fail' in the mind of government agents is not...