Recent empirical work shows evidence of a positive relationship between firm-specific corporate governance and firm valuation. Instead of looking at a single control mechanism, we use a broad corporate governance index and additional variables related to ownership structure, board...

Recent empirical work shows that a better legal environment leads to lowerexpected rates of return in an international cross-section of countries. Thispaper investigates whether differences in firm-specific corporate governancealso help to explain expected returns in a cross-section of firms...

We investigate the performance of a sample of German mutual equity funds overthe period from 1994 to 2003. Our general finding is that mutual funds, on average,hardly produce excess returns relative to their benchmark that are large enough tocover their expenses. This conclusion is drawn from a...

This paper investigates the impact of individual bank fundamental variables onstock market returns using data from a panel of 235 European banks from 1991to 2005. The sample period marks a significant transition in the European bankingsector, characterized by higher competition, lower profit...

Based on a sample of 7,378 firms going public in the 1975-2005 period, we document a significant underperformance of IPO firms over the first year after going public, while there is virtually no underperformance thereafter. Moreover, by decomposing the Carhart-alpha we find that IPO...

This paper examines properties of mean-variance inefficient proxies with respect to producing a linear relation between expected returns and betas. The numerical results of a Monte Carlo simulation show that in the CAPM slightly inefficient, positively weighted proxies cause an almost perfect...

We present a regression-based generalization of the calendar time portfolio approach which allows for decomposing the risk-adjusted performance of private investors (or firms or mutual funds) into multivariate and continuous subject characteristics. Our technique remedies several well-known...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of both the first release of analysts' stock recommendations to a limited clientele and the subsequent dissemination of the same information in a major newspaper to a broader audience. For a sample of 1460 stock recommendations published in FuW,...

This paper presents an integrated analysis of the relationships between managerial share ownership (or alternatively the percentage of equity-based compensation), four additional corporate governance mechanisms, and firm value by explicitly incorporating the simultaneity of the process...

The doctoral thesis of Louis Bachelier (1900) is widely considered as the seminal work inoption pricing theory. However, only a few years later, 1908, Vinzenz Bronzin, who wasa professor of actuarial science at the Accademia di Commercio e Nautica in Trieste,published a booklet (in German) on...