This paper studies how legal sanctions and enforcement affect brokers' conflicts of interest emanating from investment banking activities. We exploit the recent adoption of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) across European countries and use the variation in legal sanctions and enforcement that...

In the recent years, the US and the EC have witnessed the adoption of new regulations focused on financial analysts. This study investigates whether the European regulations, known as the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) changed the distribution of recommendations and increased their credibility...

Recent years have witnessed the adoption of new laws regulating the financial analyst profession in the US. The EU followed by passing the Market Abuse Directive and two subsequent Directives in 2003. Were these Directives necessary and did they reach their target? We first analyze whether...

This study examines the economic consequences of the Market Abuse Directive which is notably aimed at curbing conflicts of interest in the EU. It focuses on the impact of this new regulation on stock price changes associated with recommendations issued by analysts potentially affected by...

In this paper, we investigate the properties of weekly stock market returns indexes. Four series are examined (Germany, France, United Kingdom and Switzerland). Non linear dependances are found for these markets. The QGARCH class of models describes the returns quite well. Residuals are i.i.d....

We examine the long-run performance of firms that offer seasoned equity on the Swiss market. Swiss firms use offerings with rights to raise new equity and they can issue three types of securities. Moreover, the tax law has for some firms the effect of increasing the issuing frequency. We find...

This paper examines the impact of interest rate derivatives enforced by creditors and interest rate derivatives used voluntarily on firm value, separately in a sample of 3881 firm-years from 1998 to 2005. Voluntary hedging positions include derivatives for corporate risk management practices and...