We build a model of mutual fund competition in which a fraction of investors ("unsophisticated") exhibit a preference for familiarity. Funds differ both in their quality and their visibility: While unsophisticated investors have varying degrees of familiarity with respect to more visible funds,...

The ownership nationality of large US multinational companies plays an implicit but important role in the current debate over how such companies should be taxed. This paper identifies that role and investigates what is actually known about where these companies’ shareholders reside.

This study describes firms that sponsor defined benefit pension plans (DBPP) based on firm specific characteristics, financial and operating performance. Firms are classified into portfolios based on their funding levels and described accordingly. The results suggest that firms in the most...

Owning to the success of the Grameen Bank and other microfinance institutions in recent years, microfinance institutions’ role as a potential policy tool in poverty alleviation has received considerable attention. Empirical evidence from existing research shows some positive results in...

This paper provides a new hedge fund replication method, which extends Kat and Palaro (2005) and Papageorgiou, Remillard and Hocquard (2008) to multiple trading assets with both long and short positions. The method generates a target payoff distribution by the cheapest dynamic portfolio. The...

The study explores the impact of the susu scheme, an informal banking mechanism for daily or weekly collection of deposits prevalent on the West African markets, on small businesses in Ghana. Evidence gathered from the analysis of a randomly-drawn sample size of 1,600 small business owner...

This study examines the performance of socially responsible mutual funds from 1999 to 2009. To minimize the benchmark error, we apply propensity-score-matching method to identify a most comparable conventional fund for every socially responsible fund based on several key fund characteristics. We...

This paper incorporates human capital into the well-established portfolio theory by allowing for job security in personal portfolio choice. Our model predicts that young people hold more cash to hedge against risk associated with human capital (layoff risk). As people age, layoff risk decreases,...

Bank-specific determinants of bank failure during the financial crisis in Colombia are identified and studied using duration analysis. The process of failure of banks and related financial institutions during that period can be explained by differences in financial health and prudence across...

The paper describes the characteristics of the market for private placements and discusses the necessary conditions for their uptake in Europe. A private placement is a method of financing used mainly by medium-sized companies which, unable to access the public bond market, turn to one or more...