Real-world portfolio composition is often far from being mean-variance optimal. One of the phenomena documented in investment portfolios is the home bias effect, that is, investors hold a higher-than-optimal portion of domestic assets. Analyzing hand-collected data from annual reports of German...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether key investor information documents (KIDs) provided by suppliers/issuers help retail investors to understand the key characteristics of financial products. KIDs are fact sheets composed to describe the characteristics of financial...

Purpose – The authors aim to analyze whether the results of the 1980 to 2008 US presidential elections influence the stock market performance of eight industries and they seek to examine factors that are expected to affect firms' stock returns around these elections. Their empirical analysis...

Debt capital represents one of the most important means with which German companies finance their business. Yet, despite its importance, academics and practitioners alike typically analyze debt capital separately from other components of a firm's capital structure components. One important...

Herding behavior, i.e. the adjustment of a decision maker's behavior, opinion, or expectations due to real or illusionary (social) pressures, can be explained by numerous behavioral finance models, such as the cascade model or contagion. However, unambiguous empirical results are rare, mainly...

The underpricing phenomenon of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) has been widely studied across different stock markets around the world and has often been explained to be a result of asymmetrically distributed information and ex-ante uncertainty. However, as Ritter and Welch (2002) argue, these...

The overallotment or greenshoe option has become very popular in the German IPO market since its introduction in 1995 and is nowadays an important tool to stabilize IPOs or to issue additional shares in the case of excess demand. Besides providing evidence for the prevalence of price support...

Recent research has shown that institutional herding is a relevant phenomenon in stock markets. Do institutional investors also follow each other in bond markets? This paper focuses on the German bond market and uses data from 57 German mutual funds that invest mainly in DM-denominated bonds,...