We use a proprietary dataset from a large Swiss retail bank to examine the impact of financial advice on individual investors’ stock trading performance and their behavioral biases. Our data allows us to classify each individual trade as either advised or independent and to compare them in a...

This paper investigates the problem of time stamp errors in the IBES database. We show that IBES did not store the original announcement date of both recommendations and forecasts on U.S. stocks until 2001 and even later for other countries. The announcement date in IBES is often effectively the...

A focal point in strategic and regulatory debates about the pros and cons of diversification among financial institutions continues to be the issue of economies of scope in financial intermediation. In this paper, we summarize the theoretical research on the value of diversification in financial...

We analyze the valuation effect of board industry experience and channels through which industry experience of outside directors affects firm value. Firms with more experienced outside directors are valued at a premium compared to firms with less experienced outside directors. Additional tests...

We study financial reporting and corporate governance in 218 companies accused of price fixing. These firms engage in evasive financial reporting strategies, including earnings smoothing, segment reclassification, and restatements. In corporate governance, cartel firms favor outside directors...

This impressive Handbook presents the quantitative techniques that are commonly employed in empirical finance research together with real-world, state-of-the-art research examples.

The recent financial crisis has raised several questions with respect to the corporate governance of financial institutions. This paper investigates whether risk management-related corporate governance mechanisms, such as for example the presence of a chief risk officer (CRO) in a bank’s...

Our paper is a further contribution to the still very small empirical literature on the effects of competition on managerial incentive schemes. Based on a theoretical model that incorporates both strategic interaction between firms and a principal agent relationship, we investigate the...