Article history: Received 5 December 2011 Received in revised form 10 July 2012 Accepted 10 July 2012 Available online 20 July 2012 This paper analyzes the effect of financial leverage on corporate operating performance and how this effect varies across countries. Results for 10,375 firms in 39 countries indicate that the performance of firms with greater leverage is significantly reduced compa...

We develop a model in which boundedly rational agents apply technical and fundamental analysis to identify trading signals in two different speculative markets. Whether an agent trades and, if so, in which market with which strategy depends on profit considerations. As it turns out, an ongoing evolutionary competition between the trading strategies causes complex price dynamics which closely re...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the shadow economy in the Spanish Autonomous Communities. In so doing, we employ the Currency Demand Approach to analyze the 1987–2010 period. The results show that the size of the shadow economy ranges from 18% to 30% of regional GDP and an approximate mean value of 25% for the entire territory. The Personal Income Tax has the greatest impact on the shadow e...

We demonstrate that legislation has a simple, yet previously undetected impact on stock prices. Exploiting the voting record of legislators whose constituents are the affected industries, we show that the votes of these “interested” legislators capture important information seemingly ignored by the market. A long-short portfolio based on these legislators’ views earns abnormal returns of over 9...

We propose a model in which firms compete to attract better managers by using corporate governance as part of an optimal executive compensation scheme. Higher governance decreases the cost of taking disciplinary actions against managers, but when managerial talent is scarce, competition among firms to attract better managers implies that firms under-invest in governance. The reason is that mana...

We assess the impact of institutions on Chinese firms’ corporate investment in an investment Euler equation framework. We allow the variables measuring institutions to affect the rate at which firm managers discount future investment payoffs. Applying generalized method of moments estimators to large samples of Chinese firms, we estimate the stochastic discount rates derived from actual investm...

This paper characterizes the optimal linear financial transaction tax in an equilibrium model of competitive financial markets. As long as investors hold heterogeneous beliefs about the returns of assets in fixed supply and the planner calculates welfare using any single belief, we expect the optimal tax to be positive, even when a fraction of trading is fundamental. Strikingly, the optimal tax...

Article history: Received 6 August 2014 Received in revised form 14 November 2015 Accepted 16 November 2015 Available online 26 November 2015 This paper examines the incentives of national regulators to coordinate capital adequacy requirements in the presence of systemic risk in global financial markets. In a two-country model, correlated asset fire sales by banks generate systemic risk across ...

This paper provides a set of empirical tests of the cross-sectional variation of stock volatility and investablility, where investability is defined as the degree to which a stock is accessible to foreigners. Unlike previous studies, which focus on market volatility and market return, we study the relationship between individual stock return volatility and its investablility. Our findings have ...

The probability approach to uncertainty and modeling is applied to default probability estimation. This issue has attracted attention as banks contemplate the requirements of Basel II’s IRB rules. Nicholas M. Kiefer proposes the fomal introduction of expert information into quantitative analysis. An application treating the incorporation of expert information on the default probability is consi...