We investigate the relation between a country's first-time enforcement of insider trading laws and stock price informativeness using data from 48 countries over 1980--2003. Enforcement of insider trading laws improves price informativeness, as measured by firm-specific stock return variation,...

We develop and test the hypothesis that foreign direct investment promotes corporate governance spillovers in the host country. Using firm-level data on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and corporate governance in 22 countries, we find that cross-border M&As are associated with...

This paper challenges the widely accepted stylized fact that chief executive officers (CEOs) in the United States are paid significantly more than their foreign counterparts. Using CEO pay data across fourteen countries with mandated pay disclosures, we show that the U.S. pay premium is...

We use a new dataset to study how mutual fund flows depend on past performance across 28 countries. We show that there are marked differences in the flow-performance relationship across countries, suggesting that US findings concerning its shape do not apply universally. We find that mutual fund...

This paper studies the determinants of the domestic and the foreign bond biases and their evolution over time using aggregate bond allocation data from CPIS. Our results show that the home bias is prevalent across all countries, despite the decreasing of the domestic bias in most countries in...

We investigate the effects of bank control over borrower firms whether by representation on boards of directors or by the holding of shares through bank asset management divisions. Using a large sample of syndicated loans, we find that banks are more likely to act as lead arrangers in loans when...

In this research paper we examine the determinants of capital structure using a large panel of firms from 31 countries, all with different legal systems and different levels of investor protection. Our results confirm that institutional variables play an important role in a firm's capital...

We develop and test the hypothesis that stock price informativeness affects the structure of corporate boards. We find a negative relation between price informativeness and board independence. This finding is robust to the inclusion of many firm-level controls, including firm fixed effects, and...

We propose forecasting separately the three components of stock market returns--the dividend-price ratio, earnings growth, and price-earnings ratio growth--the sum-of-the-parts (SOP) method. Our method exploits the different time series persistence of the components and obtains out-of-sample...

We show that pay is higher for chief executive officers (CEOs) with general managerial skills gathered during lifetime work experience. We use CEOs' résumés of Standard and Poor's 1,500 firms from 1993 through 2007 to construct an index of general skills that are transferable across firms and...