In recent years financial economists have increasingly questioned the efficient market hypothesis. But surely if market prices were often irrational and if market returns were as predictable as some critics have claimed, then professionally managed investment funds should easily be able to outdistance a passive index fund. This paper shows that professional investment managers, both in The U.S....

In this analysis of the risk and return of stocks in the United States and global markets, we apply several portfolio construction and optimization techniques to U.S. and global stock universes. We find that (1) mean-variance techniques continue to produce portfolios capable of generating excess returns above transaction costs and statistically significant asset selection, (2) optimization tech...

Disclosure by firms would seem to reduce the informational asymmetry that causes investment inefficiency in firms. However, the effect of disclosure is subtle, especially when the link between disclosure and firm value is endogenous and depends on incentives within the firm. We analyze various disclosure regimes and determine which ones are effective in a model with optimal renegotiationproof c...

As more manufacturing is moved to the developing countries, policy makers become concerned with the environmental consequence. Relatively lenient environmental policies in the developing countries may give them a comparative advantage in pollution intensive goods, and openness to trade and foreign direct investment might harm the host country’s environment. This study examines the relationship ...

Through an additive efficiency decomposition (AED) approach in data envelopment analysis (DEA), we evaluate the management and investment efficiencies of Investment Trust Corporations (ITCs) in Taiwan for the period 2007–2011. Furthermore, the AED-DEA and a network-based ranking approach in DEA are jointly used to rank and identify ITCs that can be treated as benchmarks. Frontier projections fo...

This paper suggests that the use of investment incentives focusing exclusively on foreign firms, although motivated in some cases from a theoretical point of view, is generally not an efficient way to raise national welfare. The main reason is that the strongest theoretical motive for financial subsidies to inward FDI – spillovers of foreign technology and skills to local industry – is not an a...

Few previous studies have explored whether defined contribution retirement saving plans offer sufficiently diversified investment menus, though it is likely that these menus significantly shape workers’ accumulations of retirement wealth. This paper assesses the efficiency and performance of 401(k) investment options offered by a large group of US employers. We show that the majority of plans i...

• Since Wilkie’s result [9] (which established that the elementary theory Texp of (R, exp) is model complete and o-minimal), many o-minimal expansions of the reals have been investigated. The problem of constructing nonarchimedean models of Texp (and more generally, of an ominimal expansion of the reals) gained much interest. • In [2] it was shown that fields of generalized power series cannot ...

The Extraordinary Magnetoresistance (EMR) effect is a change in the resistance of a device upon the application of a magnetic field in hybrid structures, consisting of a semiconductor and a metal. The underlying principle of this phenomenon is a change of the current path in the hybrid structure upon application of a magnetic field, due to the Lorentz force. Specifically, the ratio of current, ...