Prior empirical evidence regarding the impact of dividend taxes, corporate taxes, and corporate governance on firm valuation is inconclusive. This study avoids some of the complications encountered in previous empirical work by exploiting institutional characteristics of REITs, such as their...

This study investigates whether and how the deviation of cash flow rights (ownership) from voting rights (control), or simply the ownership-control wedge, influences the likelihood that extreme negative outliers occur in stock return distributions, which we refer to as stock price crash risk. We...

This paper analyzes influences on the credit standing of Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), specifically the quality, diversification and single name concentration of their portfolios, and on the market practice known as Preferred Creditor Status (PCS), whereby sovereigns that default on...

We investigate whether ESG ratings predict future ESG news and the associated market reactions. We find that the consensus rating predicts future news, but its predictive ability diminishes for firms with large disagreement between raters. Relation between news and market reaction is moderated...

Index providers increasingly offer sustainable stock indices based on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) ratings of firms. The performance of such indices with ESG tilts is driven by the impact of the applied weighting methodology and by the ESG firm ratings. In this paper, we focus on...

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations play an increasingly important role in investment decisions. Due to data vendors’ lack of a common framework for creating ESG ratings, substantial disparities exist across vendors in their ESG ratings for the same company. ESG rating...

We introduce a novel framework to predict the relative accuracy of sell-side analysts' annual earnings forecasts out-of-sample. Prior studies only evaluate forecasts shortly before the corresponding earnings release. In contrast, our study is the first to provide long-term predictions which are...

This paper analyzes influences on the credit standing of Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), specifically the quality, diversification and single name concentration of their portfolios, and on the market practice known as Preferred Creditor Status (PCS), whereby sovereigns that default on...

This study's underlying premise is that current pension plan accounting has two important negative effects. First, it distorts the measurement of earnings and net worth in the short run, as well as the pattern of earnings over future periods. Second, this distortion can send incorrect signals to...

A new test for constant correlation is proposed. Based on the bivariate Student-t distribution, this test is derived as Lagrange multiplier (LM) test. Whereas most of the traditional tests (e.g. Jennrich, 1970, Tang, 1995 and Goetzmann, Li & Rouwenhorst, 2005) specify the unknown correlations as...