In this paper, we investigate whether a firm’s Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives could affect its financial performance. We specifically investigate the firm’s capital allocation efficiency as a moderating channel affecting their performance. We employ a comprehensive sample of...

This study examines the impact of natural disasters on market returns and on several industries that are likely to be affected by the disasters. We find that different natural disasters have different impacts on the returns of the market and on those of industries. Our evidence suggests that...

Using a cross-country sample of mergers and acquisitions, we examine the role of cultural, institutional, geographic and managerial factors on post-merger default risk. Our results are consistent with the asymmetric hypothesis that managers take advantage of the overvaluation and volatility of...

The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) introduced the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) in 1993. The index has come to act as the benchmark for stock market volatility and, more generally, investor sentiment. The VIX has proven to be very useful in forecasting the future market direction especially...

Many countries have adopted criminal sanctions as a way to deter insider trading. Although criminal sanctions represent a much greater penalty than civil sanctions, the enforceability of criminal sanctions is weaker given the higher burden of proof required. This trade-off between severity and...

This paper explicitly examines the interactive impact of country level legal and financial development, and firm level governance attributes on the cost of equity capital. Using a comprehensive sample of 7380 firm years drawn from 22 developed countries, we show that firm level governance...

This paper examines the contemporaneous spill-over effects among the CBOE implied volatility indices for stocks (VIX), gold (GVZ) and the exchange rate (EVZ). We use the 'identification through heteroskedasticity' approach of Rigobon (2003) to decompose the contemporaneous relationship between...