In this paper, we investigate the damage to real-sector investment spending and corporate financing activities triggered by the failure of three major investment banks during the 2007-09 financial crisis. We find that firms characterized by pre-crisis corporate investment banking relationships...

We analyze the valuation effect of board industry experience and channels through which industry experience of outside directors affects firm value. Firms with more experienced outside directors are valued at a premium compared to firms with less experienced outside directors. Additional tests...

The literature on shareholder voting has mostly focused on the influence of proxy advisors on shareholder votes. We exploit a unique empirical setting enabling us to provide a direct estimate of management’s influence. Analyzing shareholder votes on the frequency of future say on pay votes, we...

We investigate whether investor reactions to the announcement of a new outside director appointment significantly depend on the director’s experience in the appointing firm’s industry. We use a sample of 385 outside directors appointed to the board of S&P 500 companies from 2008 to 2010. Our...

Using a sample of 384 shareholder meetings, we investigate whether shareholder votes on mergers and acquisitions in both target and acquirer firms relate to the announcement day abnormal returns and whether the voting outcome has implications for the short- and long-run merger performance. We...

Based on the theory of static replication of variance swaps we assess the sign and magnitude of variance risk premiums in foreign exchange markets. We find significantly negative risk premiums when realized variance is computed from intraday data with low frequency. As a likely consequence of...

We analyze whether newspaper content can predict aggregate future stock returns. Our study is based on articles published in the Handelsblatt, a leading German financial newspaper, from July 1989 to March 2011. We summarize newspaper content in a systematic way by constructing word-count indices...

Relational contracts have been shown to mitigate moral hazard in labor and credit markets. A central assumption in most theoretical and experimental studies is that, upon misbehaving, agents can be excluded from their current source of income and have to resort to less attractive outside...

This paper examines whether investors receive a compensation for holding stocks with a strong sensitivity to extreme market downturns in a worldwide sample covering 40 different countries. I find that stocks with strong crash sensitivity earn higher average returns than stocks with weak crash...

In this paper, we show that large inflows into commodity investments, a recent phenomenon known as financialization, has changed the behavior and dependence structure between commodities and the general stock market. The common perception is that the increase in comovements is the result of...