We examine the relationship between CEO ownership and stock market performance of S&P 500 (S&P 1500) firms from 1994-2005 (1996-2005). We find that firms in which the CEO holds a considerable share of outstanding stocks outperform the market by up to 16% p.a. after controlling for traditional...

Should the law restrict liability of defaulting borrowers‘ We abstract from possible benefits arising from limited rationality or risk-aversion of borrowers, contractual incompleteness, or lender moral hazard. We focus instead on general equilibrium implications of liability rules with moral...

Suppose the value of a firm is endogenously determined by a manager's costly effort. We call this manager a distinguished player if he also can trade shares of the firm on a market. Arbitrage-free asset pricing theory suggests that the equilibrium market price reflects the value increasing...

Most analyses of the recent financial crisis in the US focus on the consequences of the dramatic slump in housing prices that started in the mid-2000s, which led to rising mortgage defaults, shrinking home equity credit and liquidity in the banking system. Yet these accounts do not explain what...

We consider a public firm characterized by a moral hazard problem. A distinguished player is a CEO or activist shareholder who (i) is unrestricted to trade shares and (ii) has discretion to increase the value of this firm by exerting costly effort. von Lilienfeld-Toal and Rünzi (J Finance...

Fund companies regularly send shareholder letters to their investors. We use textual analysis to investigate whether these letters' writing style influences fund flows and whether it predicts performance and investment styles. Fund investors react to the tone and content of shareholder letters:...

In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden erstmals die Determinanten der Zuflüsse deutscher Aktienfonds empirisch untersucht. Für den Untersuchungszeitraum von 1991 bis 2003 finden wir einige interessante Unterschiede zum US-Markt. Zunächst bestätigen wir die in der Literatur dokumentierte positiv...

In this paper we examine intra-firm competition in the U.S. mutual fund industry. Our empirical study shows that fund managers within mutual fund families compete against each other. They adjust the risk they take dependent on the relative position within their fund family. The direction of the...

This paper provides the first empirical test of the diversification of opinions theory and the group shift theory using real business data. Our data set covers management teams and single managers of US equity mutual funds. Our results reject the group shift theory and support the...

This paper is concerned with differences in the performance-flow relationship (PFR) between standard and specialist market segments of the mutual fund industry. We expect differences in this relationship because investor characteristics might vary across different segments. Our results show that...