We examine the risk-return characteristics of a rolling portfolio investment strategy where more than six thousand Nasdaq initial public offering (IPO) stocks are bought and held for up to five years. The average long-run portfolio return is low, but IPO stocks appear as ‘longshots’, as...

What role do sentiment investors play in the pricing of newly listed stocks? We derive conditions under which we can distinguish between sentiment and rational pricing behaviour and test for the rationality of small investors’ demand for new stock issues using data from pre-issue (or...

Recent empirical work suggests a strong connection between the incentives money managers are offered and their risk-taking behavior. We develop a general model of delegated portfolio management, with the feature that the agent can control the riskiness of the portfolio. This represents a...

This Paper constitutes a first attempt to analyse the impact of the emergence of new funds on portfolio decisions of mutual fund managers who are evaluated on the basis of relative performance. Recent theoretical literature has pointed to the inefficiencies in portfolio selection caused by...

There is now extensive empirical evidence showing that fund managers have relative performance objectives and adapt their investment strategy in the last part of the calendar year to balance their performance in the early part of the year. However, emphasis was put on returns in excess of some...

This paper takes a systematic look at the portfolio choice problem faced by investment banks or funds investing in transition economies. We relate the performance of projects in the transition economies to the broader macroeconomic and international environment, which affect the project through...

The efficient markets hypothesis implies that, in the presence of rational investors, bubbles cannot develop. We analyse the trading behaviour of a sophisticated investor, a London goldsmith bank, during the South Sea bubble in 1720. The bank believed the stock to be overvalued, yet found it...

Using an equilibrium asset and option pricing model in a production economy under jump diffusion, we show theoretically that the aggregated excess market returns can be predicted by the skewness risk premium, which is constructed to be the difference between the physical and the risk-neutral...

We consider the debt capacity of a risky asset when debt is being rolled over and there is a liquidation cost in case of default. We show that debt capacity depends on how information about the quality of the asset is revealed. When the information structure is based on “optimistic”...

We study IPOs by focusing on the degree of portfolio diversification of the shareholders taking the company public. We argue that a less diversified shareholder has more to gain from taking the company public and would be more willing to accept a lower price for the sale of its shares, i.e....