The topic of this paper has been motivated by the rising unemployment rate of low-skilled relative to high-skilled labour in Switzerland. Between 1991 and 2014, Switzerland experienced the highest relative increase in the low-skilled unemployment rate among all OECD countries. A natural culprit...

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...

It is often argued that Black-Scholes (1973) values overstate the subjective value of stock options granted to risk-averse and under-diversified executives. We construct a "representative" Swiss executive and extend the certainty-equivalence approach presented by Hall and Murphy (2002) to assess...

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...

Using a panel of 425 European firms over the period from 1990 to 2005, we revisit Welch's (2004) finding that stock returns are the primary determinant of capital structure changes and that the corporate motives for issuing activities remain largely unexplained. We document that about half of...

We use a dynamic framework and panel methodology to investigate the determinants of a firms' time-varying capital structure. Our sample comprises 706 European firms from France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. over the period from 1983 to 2002. If capital structure adjustment is costly, firms may...

We use a dynamic framework and panel methodology to investigate the determinants of a time-varying corporate capital structure. Our sample comprises 706 European firms from France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. over the period from 1983 to 2002. If capital structure adjustment is costly, firms may...

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,...