This article explores life insurance consumption in 31 European countries from 2003 to 2012 and aims to investigate the extent to which market transparency can affect life insurance demand. The cross-country evidence for the entire sample period shows that greater market transparency, which...

We test whether and how equity overvaluation affects corporate financing decisions using an ex ante misvaluation measure that filters firm scale and growth prospects from market price. We find that equity issuance and total financing increase with equity overvaluation; but only among overvalued...

We examine the relation between an ex ante measure of IPO growth prospects – the industry-level long-term analyst earnings growth forecast – and short- and long-run IPO returns, using a sample of 7,570 IPOs from 1982 to 2007. The use of an industry-level, rather than firm-level growth...

We apply an ex ante measure of heterogeneity in investor beliefs - excess industry volatility - to test the Miller (1977) prediction about IPO overvaluation in a sample of 7,212 IPOs from 1980 to 2003. Generally, IPOs in industries with high investor heterogeneity of beliefs have much higher...

This paper provides a model for valuing stocks that takes into account the stochastic processes for earnings and interest rates. Our analysis differs from past research of this type in being applicable to stocks that have a positive probability of zero or negative earnings. By avoiding the...

This paper tests the hypothesis that irrational market misvaluation affects firms' takeover behavior. We employ two contemporaneous proxies for market misvaluation, pre-takeover book/price ratios and pre-takeover ratios of residual income model value to price. Misvaluation of bidders and targets...

The question of why individual investors want dividends is investigated by submitting a questionnaire to a Dutch investor panel. The respondents indicate that they want dividends partly because the cost of cashing in dividends is lower than the cost of selling shares. Their answers provide...

We develop the Probability Scaling Method, which rescales short-window announcement period returns; and the Intervention Method, which uses returns associated with intervening events, to estimate value improvements from tender offers. These methods address biases in conventional techniques,...

One of the most challenging areas in technical analysis is the automatic detection of technical patterns that would be similarly detected by the eyes of experts. In this study, cognitive uncertainty was incorporated in technical analysis by using a fuzzy logic-based approach. The results show...

We test how market overvaluation affects corporate innovation. Estimated stock overvaluation is very strongly associated with measures of innovative inventiveness (novelty, originality, and scope), as well as R&D and innovative output (patent and citation counts). Misvaluation affects R&D more...