In Flanders (Belgium), distribution companies are to a large extent owned by the municipalities and as such these municipalities collect an important share of the profits from electricity distribution. This situation (by many it is seen as a hidden tax) cannot be maintained because, in the process of electricity market liberalisation, the ownership will be reshuffled and because the old regulat...

________________________________________________________________________ Abstract This study examines the sensitivity of equity values of oil producers to changes in the uncertainty of future oil prices. We document that this sensitivity is negatively correlated with a firm's debt ratio and its production costs. These results indicate that companies that are more likely to experience financial ...

In these notes, we formally prove that the effort and retention policies that maximize the firm’s profits are independent of realized cash flows. The proof is in two steps. The first step establishes that, in any mechanism that is incentive compatible and sequentially individually rational for the managers, the firm’s expected profits from each manager it hires are given by a formula analogous ...

I examine whether earnings that are smoother or more volatile than cash flows provide or garble information. Consistent with theories that predict more informed trading when public information is less informative, I find that bid-ask spreads and the probability of informed trading are higher both when earnings are smoother than cash flows and also when earnings are more volatile than cash flows...

Traditional models of capital budgeting including taxes are based on deterministic tax rates and tax bases. In reality, however, there are multiple sources of tax uncertainty. Tax reforms induce frequent changes in both tax rates and tax bases, making future taxation of investments a stochastic process. Fiscal authorities and tax courts create additional tax uncertainty by interpreting current ...

I analyze the effect of monetary policy actions on the cross-section of equity returns. Based on earlier theoretical work for the monetary transmission mechanism one can argue that changes in monetary policy should produce differentiated effects on firms and stocks with different characteristics. By using different portfolio sorts the results show that the impact of monthly changes in the Feder...