Companies that go public on global stock markets are not obliged to disclose earnings forecasts in their prospectuses. We use this fact to examine the shipping sector, where most firms issue earnings forecasts during the IPO process, and provide unique, international-level evidence. We find...

We examine the role of a country's institutional framework for investment and financing activities. A country's financial structure, investor rights, and legal environment are important determinants of the relation between internal cash flow and firms' investment and financing behavior. Firms...

This paper evaluates the performance of machine learning methods in forecasting stock returns. Compared to a linear benchmark model, interactions and non-linear effects help improve predictive performance. But machine learning models must be adequately trained and tuned to overcome the high...

It is often argued that Black-Scholes (1973) values overstate the subjective value of stock options granted to risk-averse and under-diversified executives. We construct a quot;representativequot; Swiss executive and extend the certainty-equivalence approach presented by Hall and Murphy (2002)...

We use a dynamic framework and panel methodology to investigate the determinants of a firms' time-varying capital structure. Our sample comprises 706 European firms from France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. over the period from 1983 to 2002. If capital structure adjustment is costly, firms may...