What makes futures hedge funds fail? The common ingredient is over betting and not being diversified in some bad scenarios that can lead to disaster. Once troubles arise, it is difficult to take the necessary actions that eliminate the problem. Moreover, many hedge fund operators tend not to...

This paper examines the concept of systemic risk and provides an intuitive account of the economic thought on systems and the development of the notion of systemic risk. It is illustrated by putting the ideas of system, systemic risk and endogenous risk in a historial perspective.

Using firm-level data from 2006 to 2013 for a set of developing countries, we examine the effects of financial development on innovation. Financial development boosts innovation by improving resource allocation and investment toward strategic sectors as well as facilitating technology to promote...

This paper examines foreign institutional investors' portfolio allocation and performance in US securities. We test how information immobility, proxied by cultural and geographical distance between the investors' home markets and the US, influences portfolio strategies. Consistent with...

When the credit crisis started in 2008, a total of 67 entrepreneurs sought advice with the European Centre of Managerial Studies in Business Administration of the Spiru Haret University in Bucharest in order to find alternatives to finance classic loans that could enable them perform their...

This paper provides evidence on the investment behavior of 27 state pension plans that manage their own equity portfolios. Even though these state plans typically hold broadly diversified portfolios, they substantially over-weight the equity of companies that are headquartered in-state. The...

Among the reforms to over-the-counter (OTC) derivative markets since the global financial crisis is a commitment to collateralise counterparty exposures and to clear standardised contracts via central counterparties (CCPs). The reforms aim to reduce interconnectedness and improve counterparty...

If there are diseconomies of scale in asset management, any predictability in mutual fund performance will be arbitraged away by rational investors seeking funds with the highest expected performance (Berk and Green, 2004). In contrast, the performance of equity mutual funds persists through...

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,...

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...