In addition to the special issue articles, we have asked three leading researchers in software engineering for their perspectives on [email protected]. We include contributions from Betty H.C. Cheng, Anthony Finkelstein, and Bran Selic as sidebars in this guest editors’ introduction. Their insights add significantly to the value of this special issue, and we thank them for their thoughtful contri...

In modern portfolio theory, the balancing of expected returns on investments against uncertainties in those returns is aided by the use of utility functions. The Kelly criterion offers another approach, rooted in information theory, that always implies logarithmic utility. The two approaches seem incompatible, too loosely or too tightly constraining investors’ risk preferences, from their respe...

Article history: Received 11 June 2012 Received in revised form 19 December 2013 Accepted 20 December 2013 Available online 28 December 2013 Adjustment costs play a prominent role in explanations of capital structure, but the extent of their economic importance is unknown. A credit line has institutional features important for this analysis, notably its sunk costs of access to the debt market, ...

This paper investigates the interactions between preemptive competition and leverage. We find that the second mover always leaves the duopoly market before the first mover, although the leader may exit before the follower’s entry. We also see the leverage effects of debt financing increasing firm values and accelerating investment, even in the presence of preemptive competition. In addition to ...

This paper argues that trade liberalization has a potentially significant impact on financial leverage. We compare the predictions of the trade-off model of capital structure with the pecking order model. In the first case, we suggest that trade liberalization affects the trade-off between the tax advantages of debt and expected bankruptcy costs. This implies that a reduction in domestic tariff...

The information contained in social tagging systems is often modelled as a graph of connections between users, items and tags. Recommendation algorithms such as FolkRank, have the potential to leverage complex relationships in the data, corresponding to multiple hops in the graph. We present an in-depth analysis and evaluation of graph models for social tagging data and propose novel adaptation...