Demand is growing for a better understanding of how assets are priced in countries outside of the U.S.While financial data are available for many firms world-wide, it is important to have a reliable andreplicable method of constructing high-quality systematic risk factors from these data. This...

This paper is the rst to empirically analyze the value to shareholders of the power to havea binding vote on management pay. We nd that in response to an unanticipated eventthat made it likely that an annual binding vote would become compulsory for Swiss publiccompanies, the apparent immediate...

This paper develops a structural equilibrium model with intertemporal macroeconomic risk, in-corporating the fact that ¯rms are heterogeneous in their asset composition. Compared to ¯rmswhich are mainly composed of invested assets, ¯rms with growth options have larger costs ofdebt because...

This paper investigates the extent to which voluntary disclosure quality (VDQ) of firms isreflected in equity prices. In environments where we expect informational efficiency to behigh, VDQ is not associated with returns beyond those available through passively investingin popular styles, and a...

This paper studies the extent to which risk-taking incentives of CEOs and other governancefeatures in a range of years prior to the recent financial crisis were related to the write-downsof U.S. financial institutions during the crisis. We document that institutions whose CEOs hadparticularly...

This paper summarizes the short selling restrictions adopted—mainly on anemergency basis—in the time period of July 2008 up to mid-June 2010 in 56countries around the world. It is a supplement to a recent article of theauthors (Gruenewald et al., 2010) and gives a detailed overview of...

What determines citizens' satisfaction with the constitution in operation ? We make two contributions towards an answer to this important policy question. First, we place stronger emphasis than existing studies on quantitative interpretations of the importance of different factors. We use...

This paper explores one potentially important channel through which immigration may drive support for extreme-right-wing parties: the presence of immigrants in the voters' neighborhoods. We study the case of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Under the leadership of Jörg Haider, this party...

Using modern methods for analyzing multi-level data, we find that, by and large, citizens of OECD countries are more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country if more environmental policies are in place and if environmental quality is higher. We also document that parents care...

We construct a panel of satisfaction with democracy (SWD) and economic, institutional, and environmental variables for 1990-2001 for fifteen European countries. In this sample, controlling for a number of factors, we find that average SWD is higher where (1) there exists an energy / CO2 tax,...