The legal origin literature documents that civil and common law traditions have different impact on rules and economic outcomes. We contribute to this literature by investigating the relationship between corporate social responsibility and legal origins. Consistently with the main differences in...

We compare characteristics of cooperative and non cooperative banks at world level in a time spell including the global financial crisis. Cooperative banks have higher net loans/total assets ratio, lower income from non traditional activites and lower shares of derivatives over total assets than...

We investigate the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (hereafter CSR) and I/B/E/S analysts' earnings per share (EPS) forecasts using a large sample of US firms for the 1992-2011 period. Based on literature findings we decompose the CSR effect into four factors: accounting...

Idiosyncratic volatility (IV) is regarded as a measure of firm specific information and has been shown to be correlated with ex post lower stock returns. We explore the nexus between IV and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and document that IV is positively correlated with net aggregate CSR...

We investigate the performance of Socially Responsible Funds (SRFs) and Conventional Funds (CFs) in different market segments during the 1992-2012 period. From an unbalanced sample of more that 22,000 funds, we define a matched sample using a beta-distance measure to match any SRF with the...

We analyze the performance of a large sample of SR stocks relative to a control sample of equivalent size for 14 years. We find that individual SR stocks have on average significantly lower returns and unconditional variance than control sample stocks when controlling for industry effects. This...

Reduced exchange rate volatility and higher and less heterogeneous quality of institutional rules and macroeconomic policies are two of the main (anticipated and concurring) effects expected from a currency union. In this paper we measure the magnitude of these two effects for the Eurozone...

By assuming that a large share of investors (which we call fundamentalists) follows a fundamental approach to stock picking, we build a discounted cash flow (DCF) model and test on a sample of high-tech stocks whether the strong and the weak version of the model are supported by data from the US...

Using a unique panel dataset from 2006-2012 Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth that links households to their main bank, we are able to investigate the determinants of bank switching by households. Household-bank relationship matters crucially in terms of exclusivity (using a...

We study the ex-ante budget devoted by a Political Principal to a Competition Authority in charge of collecting evidence on the Industry's behavior. The Industry can capture both the Principal (lobbying) for a reduced budget, and the Authority (side-contracting) so as to avoid fines. Authority's...