Research Question/Issue: The level and effectiveness of investors' protection is considered to foster financial markets development and economic growth. While previous studies focused on the relationship between the institutional setting and investors' protection at country level, we investigate...

We investigate bank opaqueness by looking at the frequency of large, negative, market-adjusted returns (crashes). We analyze crashes on a sample of US stocks traded in the 1990-2007 period. Jin and Myers (2006) predict that opaqueness coupled with weak investors' protection generate more...

We evaluate the impact of government ownership on the issuer and individual ratings of a sample of 224 large European banks over the 1999-2004 period. Individual ratings differ from traditional ones in that they focus on banks' economic and financial conditions and do not take into account any...

In this paper we analyze the factors that influence the target companies' choice of a bank advisor during a merger or acquisition process. Particularly we analyze the choice of hiring an advisor in the first place (non trivial since for more than one third of the mergers in our sample the target...

In this paper, we analyze the effect of search costs on mutual fund fee dispersion. Using a heteroscedastic regression model, we can quantify the portion of the expense ratio (net of 12b-1 fees) not justified by the quality of the service provided, the cost structure of the investment company or...

Do bond investors price hidden information? This paper addresses this question by using a heteroscedastic regression model to empirically examine the factors affecting the spread dispersion unexplained by easy-to-observe issue characteristics (credit ratings, size, maturity, etc.). First,...