Using weekly observations on 9 Asian currencies from November 1976 to December 2003, we re-examine the evidence of an emerging yen block in North and Southeast Asia. In contrast to previous research that assumes instantaneous adjustment of exchange rates by the region's Central Banks to...

Using account-level transaction data at a major financial institution, we predict the incidence of suspicious activity that can be related to the external financial fraud of its elderly clients. The data consists of over 5 million accounts of clients aged 70 years and older, and over 250 million...

This paper examines cash dividends and share repurchases in Japan - discerning between keiretsu and non-keiretsu groupings of firms - during the period 1990 to 2008, a period of extensive Japanese corporate governance reform. As in the United States, share repurchases in Japan have grown...

The European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is the key policy instrument of the European Commission’s Climate Change Program aimed at reducing green- house gas emissions to eight percent below 1990 levels by 2012. A critically important element of the EU ETS is the establishment of a...

Newly privatized firms increase dividends after divestment, and also pay significantly higher dividends compared to always-private firms. We examine a sample of 83,468 firm-years (358 privatized and 4,894 always-private firms) across 26 countries and show that the dividend premium is...

We examine state income and reputation incentives to account for the high dividends of privatized firms. Consistent with these agency-cost based incentives, we show that the extent of state ownership positively impacts corporate dividends. We distinguish between the empirical importance of these...