Investment performance studies of pension or mutual funds have overall been too statistically inconclusive to create definitive rankings to help investors make fund selection decisions. This paper presents an alternative approach based on comparing the pension or mutual fund firms themselves...

Fundamental indexing based on accounting valuation has drawn significant interest from academics and practitioners in recent times as an alternative to capitalisation weighted indexing based on market valuation. This paper investigates the claims of superiority of fundamental indexation strategy...

The growing importance of private pension funds in the global financial, economic and public policy landscape has led to increasing regulatory and public interest in their governance and performance. Looking at the Australian private pension (superannuation) funds, this paper examines the impact...

Using the most comprehensive database on Australian hedge funds, we test the performance persistence for the period July 2000 to June 2005. We employ both parametric and nonparametric approaches to identify persistence. We report evidence of short-term persistence and no evidence of long-term...

This paper examines the interaction between short-run return reversals, momentum and idiosyncratic volatility in the Australian market. We confirm that stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility earn low average returns over the next month. Unlike US studies which attribute this negative relation...

We study a sample of 568 Australian rights offerings made during 2003-08 to examine the market response to the reasons stated by the firm for the use of capital on announcements. We also examine the impact of the extent of disclosure of use of proceeds on market response. Using event study...

Empirical analysis of financial data such as the daily, weekly or monthly prices of assets such as bonds, stocks, currencies and commodities have shown that asset prices approximately follow a martingale process, but the distribution of asset returns tend to be fat-tailed. This paper examines...

Recent theory relates expected returns and covariant risk to the investment decisions of a firm. The irreversible nature of physical assets-in-place results in them being riskier than growth options across certain stages of the business cycle. Using the Australian accounting environment, this...

This paper examines the effect of order imbalance on realized volatility in the Australian stock market for the period between August 2007 and May 2016. To analyse this asymmetric relationship, we decompose order imbalance into buyer- and seller-initiated trades and capture good and bad...