We investigate the performance of a sample of German mutual equity funds over the period from 1994 to 2003. Our general finding is that mutual funds, on average, hardly produce excess returns relative to their benchmark that are large enough to cover their expenses. This conclusion is drawn from...

We examine the impact of financial disclosures’ readability on future shareholder activism, as expressed by shareholder-initiated proxy proposals. Based on a sample of 1,560 proposals made by shareholders of 818 S& P 1500 firms between 2000 and 2014, we find that the semantic complexity of the...

Previous studies document statistically significant evidence of crude oil return predictability by several forecasting variables. We suggest that this evidence is misleading and follows from the common use of within-month averages of daily oil prices in calculating returns used in predictive...

We study the out-of-sample predictability of the real price of crude oil using forecast combinations constructed from several individual predictors. We find that forecasts of themonthly average price of oil are more accurate than the no-change forecast at horizons ranging from 1 to 24 months...