Ethical investments have become increasingly popular over the past years. Ethical funds restrict their investment based on environmental, social and/or ethical criteria. Prior research on the performance of ethical versus non-ethical funds yields mixed results. This paper investigates the...

The signaling hypothesis suggests that firms have incentives to underprice their initial public offerings (IPOs) to signal their quality to the outside investors and to issue seasoned equity (SEO) at more favorable terms. While the initial empirical evidence on the signaling hypothesis was weak,...

We show that firms 'in danger' of being delisted from a stock market (NASDAQ) report higher performance-adjusted discretionary accruals and the inflated accruals are associated with an increased likelihood of maintained listing. Accruals of firms 'in danger' are less positive in fiscal quarters...

A prominent factor used in most models predicting stock returns is firm size. Yet no consensus has emerged on the magnitude and stability of the size premium, with some researchers even questioning the usefulness of the factor. To take stock of the voluminous academic literature on the size...

A key theoretical prediction in financial economics is that under risk neutrality and rational expectations a currency's forward rates should form unbiased predictors of future spot rates. Yet scores of empirical studies report negative slope coefficients from regressions of spot rates on...

Shareholder activism constitutes an increasingly prominent feature of corporate governance landscape. There is a controversy in prior research over whether and how much value activism creates. We examine whether estimates of the impact of shareholder activism are published selectively in prior...

Standard economics models require that financial incentives improve performance, while leading theories in psychology allow for the opposite. Experimental results are mixed, and so far have not been corrected for publication bias and model uncertainty. We collect 1,568 economics estimates...

We examine the factors influencing published estimates of hedge fund performance. Using a sample of 1,019 intercept terms from regressions of hedge fund returns on risk factors (the "alphas") collected from 74 studies, we document a strong downward trend in the reported alphas. The trend...

We provide the first quantitative survey of the empirical literature on hedge fund per- formance. We examine the impact of potential biases on the reported results. Empirical analysis in prior studies has been plagued by fragmentation of underlying data and by lim- ited consensus on how hedge...