SUBJECT AREAS: Brands, Europe, Italy, Product management, Real estate, Real estate developments, Service industryCASE SETTING: Europe; real estate/retail; 2001Scott Malkin, CEO of Value Retail, a developer and operator of European outlet villages serving luxury brands, is planning on developing a...

We use mutual fund manager data from the technology bubble to examine the hypothesis that inexperienced investors play a role in the formation of asset price bubbles. Using age as a proxy for managers' investment experience, we find that around the peak of the technology bubble, mutual funds run...

In April 2000, in one day, 30 stocks were replaced in the Nikkei 225 index in Japan. We analyze the change in comovement of returns of stocks added to and deleted from the index with the returns of stocks remaining in the index. A simple model shows that upon inclusion into (deletion from) a...

The maturity of new debt issues predicts excess bond returns. When the share of longterm debt issues in total debt issues is high, future excess bond returns are low. This predictive power comes in two parts. First, inflation, the real short-term rate, and the term spread predict excess bond...

Firms can manipulate their stock price by limiting the ability of their investors to sell. I examine a series of corporate events in Japan in which firms actively reduced their float - the fraction of shares available to trade - for periods of one to three months, locking investors into their...

In the presence of limits to arbitrage, cross-sectional variation in periodic investor demand should be related to the degree of comovement of returns. I exploit the unusual weighting system of the Nikkei 225 index in Japan to identify cross-sectional variation in periodic demand for index...

Aggregate investment in cash and liquid assets as a share of total corporate investment is negatively related to subsequent U.S. stock market returns between 1947 and 2003. The share of cash in total investment is a more stable predictor of returns than scaled price variables and performs well...

The maturity of new debt issues predicts excess bond returns. When the share of long-term debt issues in total debt issues is high, future excess bond returns are low. This predictive power comes in two parts. First, inflation, the real short-term rate, and the term spread predict excess bond...

I examine a series of stock splits in Japan in which firms restrict the ability of their investors to sell their shares for a period of approximately 2 months. By removing potential sellers from the market, the restrictions have the effect of increasing the impact of trading on prices. The...

We use mutual fund manager data from the technology bubble to examine the hypothesis that inexperienced investors play a role in the formation of asset price bubbles. Using age as a proxy for managers' investment experience, we find that around the peak of the technology bubble, mutual funds run...