Empirical Essays in Finance

Sammanfattning: Stock Price Elasticity and Control Ownership. Stocks included in the S&P 500 experience abnormal returns. Supporting a demand pressure explanation, this paper documents that the price impact is larger for stock of which a significant fraction is held by controlling shareholders. This cross-sectional result vanishes after StandardXX1Poor's introduce index weight adjustments of control ownership in 2005. What matters for Shareholder Activism? This paper provides a comprehensive study of shareholder activism in the US. We do not detect significant differences in stock returns for different shareholder activist types, despite including hedge funds as a separate group. Investors' incentives as measured by their ownership stake, however, are more economically relevant. Municipal Lending Institutions in Sweden. This paper analyzes the institutional setup of a municipal credit agency. Refinancing advantages over commercial banks plus implementing a coinsurance mechanism across municipalities gives such an institution a lower hurdle rate for loans, making competitive municipal lending possible. Sovereign Credit Risk and Corporate Borrowing Costs. We show that an increase in sovereign credit risk leads to higher corporate borrowing costs. The results suggest more pronounced effects in countries that belong to the Eurozone, that are more financially distressed, and that have weaker property rights. Companies with high public ownership or bank-dependence are more affected.