We analyze the effect of an exogenous shock to the Italian mortgage market, where a reform has abolished prepayment fees and simplified mortgage refinancing, making it a virtually cost-free decision for households. This law, along with the considerable drop in market interest rates, has generated important gains for fixed-rate borrowers, which we quantify at up to 15% of the principal balance. Nevertheless, only about 13% of borrowers have locked in this opportunity. We study the relationship between this sluggish behavior and their level of financial literacy.

Since the seminal work of Ingersoll (1977b) the optimal time in which a firm should redeem its outstanding convertible bonds has received large attention by the financial literature. Several studies have put forward a number of possible costs and benefits for a firm if it interrupts the life of its convertible bonds prior to their contractual maturity. However, in this paper we argue that the managerial decision to call back a convertible bond is mainly driven by a fundamental variable almost neglected up until now: the time value extraction from bondholders’ conversion option. Accordingly, we propose a measure for the effective convenience of calling—which we define as net time value advantage—and we show, using a survival analysis, that it is more effective than previously proposed measures in explaining the firms’ observed call policy.

Hiring and promotion committees consider a broad range of journals and the relative importance of journal titles is highly subjective. In this paper, we present a novel approach to objective finance journal ranking by considering the impact of journal publications on career advancement. While the top three journals (Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies) are significant drivers of promotion success, other journals are nearly as important, particularly for business schools outside of the top tier. In rank order, these are the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Corporate Finance, and the Review of Finance.

In Italy, as in many other European countries, listed firms will normally go dark through controlling owner-initiated tender offers. We find that institutional investors play a central role in the bid process and can protect minority shareholders from being frozen out in the bid. Specifically, tender offers are less likely to succeed when a firm has institutional investors in its ownership structure. When public-to-private offers are accepted, bid premiums are significantly greater if a financial institution (particularly when it is foreign, independent or activist) has a stake in the firm. We explore the effect of a number of hitherto unexplored factors on the takeover premium and find that shareholder agreements facilitate public-to-private acquisitions. Other factors, such as a threat to merge the target if the bid fails, or external validation of the offer price, have no impact on either the likelihood of delisting or the premium paid by the bidder.