“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” — Benjamin FranklinThe Brandes Institute has added a third inevitability to Ben Franklin's famous quip about life's certainties: short-term underperformance among active managers. Over the years, Institute research...

Global micro-cap stocks have provided greater diversification benefits and a more robust long-term value premium than small- and mid- to large-cap stocks. Among the features contributing to these benefits for micro caps worldwide:• a large, diverse universe with little sell-side research...

We examine the influence of investor conferences on firms' stock liquidity. We find that firms participating in conferences experience a 1.4% to 2.8% increase in stock liquidity compared to non-conference firms. Consistent with investor conferences improving firm visibility, the increase in...

While discussing risk issues someone told me as a joke that she wished the world were riskless and the fact that risk were present in any instance in our lives was a rather unfortunate circumstance. But would we be really better off in a riskless world?Although it may appear to be a trivial...

The Financial Crisis of 2008/2009 increased plan sponsors' desire to control risk — and we are still seeing the unfortunate effects. Many approaches adopted to control risk are illusions of risk control. Of particular concern is how sponsors are misapplying tools designed to monitor...

We examine whether the presence of privately informed traders, and information asymmetries between these traders and the rest of investors, undermine the role of accounting information in mitigating financing constraints and reducing under-investment problems. In line with prior research, we...

This research considers the strategies on the initial public offering of company equity at the stock exchanges in the imperfect highly volatile global capital markets with the nonlinearities. We provide the IPO definition and compare the initial listing requirements on the various markets. We...

Payouts, in the form of dividends and buybacks, reached a height of almost a trillion dollars per annum in recent years. A large proportion of these dollars have been directly reinvested into the stock market. Drawing on data on mutual fund holdings, I show that capital repayments are...

Economic Value Added (EVA™) and competing metrics are a leitmotif for management, strategy consultants and Wall Street. Such metrics, the synthesis of M&M proposition III and the notion of residual income, form the scholarly framework on value creation. However, the empirical evidence is poor,...