In the loanable funds model of banking, banks accept deposits of resources from savers and then lend them to borrowers. In the real world, banks provide financing, that is they create deposits of new money through lending, and in doing so are mainly constrained by expectations of profitability...

Investors today have access to a wide variety of investment opportunities thanks to the increasingly competitive nature of the market. Mutual funds, out of the many other investment options available, are the one that are best suited for the average person since they provide the ability to...

The benchmarks of a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) should take into account the economic and political context behind the creation of the SWF and the role the SWF plays as one part of a government's overall policy. The first benchmark of legitimacy ensures that the capital of the SWF is not...

This paper reports the results of a behavioural finance experiment on the ability of Thai individuals to make informed investment decisions under a defined contribution self-management option. Using an asset allocation dataset from members of the Thai Government Pension Fund (TGPF) and a control...

In this thesis, we discuss and compare target date retirement fund strategies that have been used in recent literature. These strategies include the 100% equity, glide path, maximum drawdown, risk budget and target return strategy. We conduct sensitivity analyses in order to obtain optimal...

Islamic finance is a set of financial institutions representing a connected financial architecture that works based on prescribed Shari'ah principles. Growth in the industry has been stellar, but, certain principles, the strategic direction and the practices do not warrant celebration yet. This...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the crosssection and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...

Benchmark following and portfolio rebalancing effects have often been cited when trying to explain international financial contagion phenomena. Using a dataset containing the country allocation of individual dedicated emerging market equity funds, we assess the relevance of mean-variance...