Legislative pressures continue to scrutinize auditors for failing to warn investors of subsequent company failures in their audit report (US. House of Representative 1985, 1990, 2002). Multiple literatures have highlighted auditor's reporting failures (Weil 2001; Dietz 2002; NASDAQ 2002) to provide a...

Polynomial goal programming, in which investor preferences for skewness can be incorporated, is utilized to determine the optimal portfolio from Latin American, US and European capital markets.The empirical findings suggest that the incorporation of skewness into an investors portfolio decision...

Based on several research studies and in particular the theoretical study of Prakash, de Boyrie, Hamid and Smyser (1997), it is known that the variance as well as the skewness of the probability distribution of rates of return increases if the investors' investment interval increases. In the...

In the UK, SSAP 13 requires that firms immediately expense most of their Ramp;D expenditures. The reported earnings of high-Ramp;D expenditure firms are therefore likely to convey less value-relevant information to investors than those of less research-intensive firms. Using a sample of firms...

This dissertation is a discourse on the capital market and its interactive framework of acquisition and issuance of financial assets that drive the economy from both sides--investors/lenders and issuers/users of capital assets. My work consists of four essays in financial economics that offer a...

Within the strait jacket of diversification a la Markowitz and Roy efficient portfolio structures are first enunciated, and then within that generic structure of analytical framework benefits of diversification are studied for developed and emerging economies. The study attempts to examine the...

In the UK, SSAP 13 requires that firms immediately expense most of their R&D expenditures.The reported earnings of high-R&D expenditure firms are therefore likely to convey less valuerelevantinformation to investors than those of less research-intensive firms. Using a sample offirms from the...

Since the introduction of modern portfolio theory by Roy (1952), Markowitz (1952) and Sharpe (1964) about half a century ago, the allocation of investment weights among various assets in a portfolio is one of the most important areas of research in finance. However, we are not aware of any study...

US state pension plans generally use overstated discount rates based on historical performance, creating the appearance of healthy funding at the cost of future underfunding. Conversely, adopting a US Treasury discount rate, or another alternative suggested by previous literature, would cause...