Despite a vast literature on the capital structure of the firm there still is a big gap between theory and practice. Starting with the seminal work by Modigliani & Miller, much attention has been paid to the optimality of capital structure from the shareholders’ point of view. Over the...

Large institutional investors allocate their funds over a number of classes (e.g. equity, fixed income and real estate), various geographical regions and different industries. In practice, these allocation decisions are usually made in a hierarchical (top-down), consecutive way. At the higher...

We present an analysis of the performance of the DAX, German's major stock market index, over the last two years. Our analysis is broader than conventional benchmark approaches because we study the properties of all feasible portfolios, i.e. portfolios composed given the same investment...

In this paper we present and illustrate using real-life data a framework for managing an investment portfolio in which the investment opportunities are described in terms of a set of attributes and part of this set is intended to capture the effects on society. Here we link with the emerging...

Over the last decade we have witnessed the rise and fall of the so-called new economy stocks. One central question is to what extent these new firms differ from traditional firms. Empirical evidence suggests that stock returns are not normally distributed. In this article we investigate whether...

Most financial-economic decisions are made consciously, with a clear and constant drive to ???good???, ???better??? or even ???optimal??? decisions. Nevertheless, many decisions in practice do not earn these qualifications, despite the availability of financial economic theory, decision sciences...

The market for corporate control in the second largest economy in the world behaves very different from that in the U.S. Using a sample of 91 mergers in the period 1982-2003 we document several distinctive features of this market in Japan. First, we show that in stark contrast to the...