We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly communist countries coupled with detailed “hard” information about the...

What role do sentiment investors play in the pricing of newly listed stocks? We derive conditions under which we can distinguish between sentiment and rational pricing behaviour and test for the rationality of small investors’ demand for new stock issues using data from pre-issue (or...

We examine whether irrational behavior among small (retail) investors drives post-IPO prices. We use prices from the grey market (the when-issued market that precedes European IPOs) to proxy for small investors' valuations. High grey market prices (indicating overoptimism) are a very good...

This paper derives an application of the minimum chi-squared (MCS) methodology to estimate the parameters of the unimodal symmetric stable distribution. The proposed method is especially suitable for large, both regular and non-standard, data sets. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to...

This paper investigates the relationship between parameters of stable distributions and characteristics of speculative processes. An empirically feasible estimation method of parameters of speculative processes through a conversion from stable distribution parameters is suggested.

This paper reviews recent stock market developments in Poland and the Czech Republic and provides a case-study of the direction of causality between stock market expansion and economic growth. It finds no evidence that the relative failure of the security market in the Czech Republic affected...