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...

This study re-examines the impact of asset maturity on debt maturity choices. The pertinent literature suffers from the fact that asset maturity typically is hard to observe. In this paper we exploit the fact that for energy utilities asset maturity can directly be measured. Using a sample of...

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....