I investigate the role of economic policy uncertainty (EPU), proxied by the news-based measure of Baker et al. (2016), in the cross-section of individual stock returns in 23 countries. I estimate a stock's beta toward its country-specific EPU index (βEPU) and show that stocks in the lowest...

This paper analyzes the effects of parliamentary disagreement over economic policy concepts across 19 developed democratic countries on firms' cost of equity capital. We model parliamentary disagreement as the seat-weighted dispersion of policy positions among all represented parties and find...

We provide evidence on the performance and the replication success of a broad sample of 72 synthetic hedge funds from January 2009 to December 2013. Thereby, we assign the term 'synthetic hedge fund' to mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with hedge fund indices as their benchmarks....

Being subject to time and budget constraints, researchers have to decide whether to attend academic conferences, and if so, which conferences are associated with the best publication outcomes. Based on acknowledgment information obtained from footnotes of more than 3,000 research articles...

We examine how production flexibility affects financial leverage. A worldwide sample of energy utilities allows us to apply direct measures for production flexibility based on their power plants. We find that production flexibility increases financial leverage. For identification, we exploit...