The dissertation involves an investigation into the circumstances of international competitiveness and how it is pursued by firms from different sugar producing and marketing nations. Understanding of competitiveness has primarily been pursued in terms of economic variables and market...

We employ an innovative methodology suggested by Bernhardt et al. (J. Financ. Econ. 80:657–675, 2006) to examine the herding (or anti-herding) behavior of German analysts regarding earnings forecasts. This methodology avoids well-known shortcomings often encountered in related studies, such as...

We show that book-to-market, size, and momentum capture cross-sectional variation in exposures to a broad set of macroeconomic factors identified in the prior literature as potentially important for pricing equities. The factors considered include innovations in economic growth expectations,...

We combine the innovative approaches of Elliott, Komunjer, and Timmermann (2005) and Patton and Timmermann (2007) with a block bootstrap to analyze whether asymmetric loss functions can rationalize the S&P 500 return expectations of individual forecasters from the Livingston Surveys. Although...